My book for jotting ideas

 Ilse van Garderen - My Heart in Hiding Stirred for a Bird. (click here for a slightly larger version)

On Sunday I dragged Riscy to the opening of the inaugural ARC Yinnar Drawing Prize.  ARC received submissions from all over Australia and the show has turned out beautifully - a credit to Jan and Jenny who put in a lot of work to make it happen.

The show will be up until 12 November and is well worth a visit.

There were heaps of wonderful drawings, but I just loved the one above by Ilse van Garderen - so I bought it!! 

I don't normally make rash purchases, but I've looked at a lot of art over the past 2-3 years so I feel more confidient.  Plus, I know that when I see something that I like AND I can stretch the budget to accomodate - I should go for it. 

I also met Ilse, her partner and some of her family - a lovely bunch :-)  I emailed Ilse last night asking for a digital image of the piece to show here - which she did - so thanks Ilse. 

Ilse is also a printmaker and book artist, areas of interest to me, so I hope to see more of her work in the future.

I also recently purchased this postcard sized print from Linden Langdon:

Linden Langdon - 'Linked' 2006 linocut and collograph (photo from Linden's site, check out her blog, it is one of my favourites)

This type of seahorse is known as a Weedy Sea Dragon, a beautiful creature to see swaying in the water - leafy bits aflutter.

In other news: I have started one of the triptych quilts and I have been felting.... so stay tuned.

(edited to tighten my grammar and add the weedy sea dragon)

Collaged in photoshop

Optus Privacy Pattern

One of the things I recently learnt about being a Type A personality is that we don't particularly like to dwell in the the planning phase of a project.  I do like planning and plotting, but it must be a short in duration.  I am a woman of action and adventure... although the action and adventure should also end fairly quickly or I'll lose interest and move onto the next thing ;-)

These three came from a set of tiny scribbles I blogged about in March last year.  They are fairly simple compared to the other two pieces and I think they would hang together nicely as a triptich.   I suspect that I'll be keen on 'simple' after cuting the other two designs out, so I have no problem including them in my Batch of Five. 

Ok, so Yippeeee.  I'm into the next phase.  Choosing fabrics and dyeing if required.  I'm actually hoping my tiny stash will do the trick.  It is far too cold to dye here at the moment!

And a Triptich.

Design 2 - Loy Yang.   This is a design I have been working on (on and off) for months.  I think the final piece will actually be quite psychedelic in colour - greens, blues and oranges.

I am planning to make this quilt quite large. Just for fun.  I feel this piece could come across too earnest or something if I do a plain two colour treatment.  I got sick of presenting plain black and white cutouts here on my blog so I've started using different colours here... not because all my next works will be brown, I just prefer looking at a softer cutout image.

Can you see I am getting more and more ambitious with my plans for cutting.  We are talking serious scissor time here.

Loy Yang is one of three brown coal fired powerstations in the Latrobe Valley.  Loy Yang Power Station is closest to my town.  Apparently Loy Yang means Big Eel in the local Aboriginal language ... and Traralgon (the town where I live), means River of Little Fishes, which is where I got the name for this blog :-)

So far, my idea of creating my work in batches is going well.  I have taken some serious time with the computer and my photgraphs and the ideas have started to develop and flow properly,  which doesn't happen if I go at it in fits and starts.  The funny thing is that the more I look into my stock of photos the more I see, even  from the same series of photographs:

 
Aren't these clouds fantastic! The same clouds were also present in the photo I used for the cutout for Loy Yang but they detracted from my main purpose there.   For those who are wondering, I played with contrast then inverted the image to get the glorious orange.  I then coloured the ground blue for contrast.