Hello dear followers

I'm not sure if anyone reads this anymore, but if you are reading this - then thank you! Being time poor as most of us are, I've decided to let my little blogspot go for a while, in the shadow of the shiny new blog over on my new website.

So please if you haven't already, you can visit the blog at www.kimflemingillustration.com/blog/ or plug the rss into your feed reader: feed://www.kimflemingillustration.com/blog/?format=rss

Thank you and happy surf-reading!

I've got some prints in a couple of exhibitions coming up...

These four trees are winging their way across the seas to fair Italia, to be part of an exhibition entitled "L'incanto del creato' in Rieti, Italy. I was very touched to be asked to be part of this international exhibition! The exhibition is to mark the 50th anniversary of a temple of St. Francis of Assisi, and the art is in response to the 'Canticle of the Creatures'.

Unfortunately with my current commitments I didn't have time to make new art. But the Canticle talks of seasons, of suns and moons, earth and fire, of sisters and brothers. It's quite beautiful actually, you can read it here. So I thought these pieces I had prepared earlier fit the bill, and work well together:

 




Yay!

Well the flurry that was Make Art That Sells finished a few weeks ago, and here finally is my wrap-up post.

Overall it was a fantastic experience and just looking from the first assignment I submitted in MATS-partA to the last in Part-B I can see how much I have developed, grown and how my eye has improved, especially for things such as patterns which I had never done before.

First assignment - Fabric market (eek!)

One of the areas I feel I grew the most in is the use of colour, especially neutrals, which was stressed a lot in the courses. I think coming from a children's book background I tend to think 'Everything Must Be Bright'! but of course that is not true. In fact having a few neutral colours and just one or two colours that pop give pieces a certain sophistication which I really like.

Ohn's beautiful work and delicate palette

Here are the pieces I put forward:

Week 1 - Paper (greeting cards)

Week 2 - Babyware

Week 3 - Scrapbooking

Week 4 - Editorial

Last assignment - Partyware

And 'Bootcamp' continues, which is MATS relaxed - a monthly schedule instead of weekly. I hope I can keep up with it while working on a new book. We will see... Thanks for following along!

Well it's been a pretty exciting week for me with the book launch of Mummy You're Special To Me as well as the opening of an exhibition featuring the illustrations from the book.

I think I've probably said enough about these events in various places lately so I won't go on too much about them and just let the photos speak for themselves. I will just say they were both lovely events and I was very happy and touched to have so many friends and lovely people come to both... But especially my good friend Jody Pratt, President of Illustrators Australia, who launched the book for me, and my new friend Leith Walton whose amazing work shared the gallery with mine.

BOOK LAUNCH!
Held Sunday May 4th at the Hill Of Content bookshop in Melbourne
see on Facebook






EXHIBITION!
Opening Friday May 9th, runs until June 8th
Hunt Club Gallery, Deer Park
(see more on Facebook)

I love Leith's octopus in the centre and he had a time lapse video of him doing a watercolour painting, on the right

Emilly's paper cuts were fantastic, she had her pieces in the foyer.

nice to see all of my illustrations together!

Well this is another special Mother's Day for me. Last Mother's Day was my first Mother's Day as a mum, and I was illustrating a book at the time. This year, that book is available, and I am so proud it is out there in the world!



It is such as special book to me as I was working on it during a really lovely time in my little boy's life. I started it when he was 8 months old, so the real difficulties of having a newborn were over, things got a bit easier and more fun. He went through incredible changes in his little life like crawling, turning one, walking and starting to talk! what an amazing time. Truly a time of marvel. I feel like I was able to put a lot of emotion into this book, and it will always remind me of this time in my life.

This is the next to last illustration in the book, and I said to my husband when I finished it that this is my son and I :)





I hope you like it. And as a little treat for following along and reading this post (does anyone read blogs anymore?) here is a bit of downloadable goodness:

mother's day card

colouring-in page

If you are interested in buying the book you can get it here: booktopia or bookworld
(only in Australia, unfortunately. With any luck it will be available in other countries/on Amazon soon....)

So happy mother's day to all the mums out there! I certainly enjoyed my special day :)

In the middle of all the Make Art That Sells mayhem, I made time to go to the ASA's One Word One Day event, to benefit the indigenous literacy foundation. This is the third year they have run this event and the first time I've been able to make it, so I was determined to go.

Basically illustrators get together for a few hours and illustrate a word. This year was 'Pounce'. You can make as many images as you like, in any medium you like, and there is a plethora of beautiful art supplies supplied by Zart.

For me, it was a time to see some friends, have a bit of fun, and play with some new materials. I think when you are constantly producing art for deadlines, it is difficult to give yourself the time to just play and be free and not worry too much about the outcome.

I was sitting next to Ann James from Books Illustrated who has a very lovely loose way of working and I think this was influencing all of us at the table. I played around with some 'Magiclay' which is like mouldable paper which then dries and you can paint it, plus some collage, feathers, leaves, buttons, watercolours, oil pastels, charcoal, fingerprinting and even mud!

I didnt know where I was going with this when I started, and that was part of the fun. Here's the craziness I ended up with :

I'm running a bit behind in my blog posting, so here's a little catch up!

MATS continues and this week it was looking at Editorial Illustration, mostly work for magazines. I have done some editorial work in the past and have to say it isn't my forté. I am not one of those illustrators who comes up with the clever concepts to illustrate difficult topics. But over the course of the week Lilla showed us a lot of her personal work from her many years as an illustrator, and i realised that there is a lot more to editorial than illustrating a headline. (or there was anyway, I'm not sure how healthy the editorial market still is for illustration these days...)

Anyway, I was sort of dreading having to illustrate an article, but was very happy to find our assignment was to illustrate a map!! which I love doing. We were supposed to do a map of our current city/town, but because I already did one of Melbourne for They Draw and Travel (click here to see) I decided to illustrate Montreal instead, my birthplace, and first love :)

I first did a bit of a sketch to figure out which elements I would be including (and also canvassed my Facebook Montreal friends for suggestions, which was very fun and interesting!) I find I can get a bit too detailed with doing maps. I love it, but I'd also like to try doing something a bit freer and more abstract. anyway, here's the sketch.

So this 3rd week in the online illustration course I'm doing 'Make Art That Sells' focussed on the Scrapbooking market. I can't say I was terribly excited about this market - even though I often use scrapbooking papers as collage in my work - but in the end I really enjoyed the process of creating this piece and it was one of my better received in the MATS community! So there you go. Open minds, people, open minds...

Our 'mini' assignment this week was to sketch ink bottles, vintage ones to be specific. This was fun. I actually went straight to carving some stamps. I've really enjoyed doing this for previous assignments, love the texture they create and am loving improving my skills with practice. So here is what I did for the 'mini':





Then we got the main assignment which was to create a design for a scrapbooking paper using the theme of 'correspondence', again with a vintage slant. I think the stamps really helped me with that look.

Thinking about how this piece would sit in my portfolio, I decided I wanted to do something that was more of a pattern which could be used in many different markets, as opposed to something suited only to scrapbooking, which might have text like 'my memories' or 'that summer' etc etc.

I went for a 'love letter' correspondence vibe, and when you think looooove, what else do you think but Paris?! So some French crept in there too. I did some more hand-carved stamps, ink work, fun splatters, and some hand-lettering:








plus a photo I took of the Eiffel tower when I was there a few (ok many) years ago. Here's how it turned out...

This week was all about baby wear - so right up my alley. Cute, fun, whimsical.

Topic: Pirates!!! Lots of fun!

So first I did some sketching and came up with the idea of doing Pirate Pigs! I made it into a bit of a pattern and everything - was all ready to start painting, and then I realised it's not really very 'baby' like. perhaps a bit of an older child with slightly edgier look and swords and everything??

so I quickly had to resketch as the assignment was upon us to do use our sketches to create a pattern for a baby onesie, and went for the all-out-cute factor.


 and put it all together with some 'coordinate' patterns. ta dah!!!



and we're already into this week's market: scrapbooking! check back next week for another post.

I am back into the swing of Make Art That Sells and already the first week is nearly done! I am very excited about the Paper market which includes greeting cards, journal covers, notepads, etc...

our 'warm-up' exercise was to draw/paint gingerbread houses which were a lot of fun (and somewhat reminiscent of cuckoo clocks!) -- looking at reference, it's amazing the amount of work people put into decorating gingerbread. they are works of art and i don't think i'd want to eat them, they're too beautiful!




then our main assignment was to create a holiday greeting card (i.e.. christmas but non-denominational) at particular dimensions, using gingerbread houses.

here was my process:

for the 'mini' warm-up I sketched here there and everywhere - in a big sketchbook, on the train in my moleskine, and on some craft paper which i quite liked because i could use white for the icing.




 I did the birds separately and some black snowflakes to be reversed and used in the background:
 

Well it's a pretty exciting day for me as my brand-spanking-new-crying-with-joy-website has finally sprung into the cyberworld, along with the release of my latest book-baby.




Please check out my new website at the same ol good address of

www.kimflemingillustration.com

it's got a fresh new look, lots of new work, links, behind the scenes peeks and all sortsa good stuff. I'd love to hear what you think of it, if you'd like to come back here to comment, or on Facebook or twitter.

Along with the new work on the site is my latest picture book through Scholastic Australia: 'Mummy You're Special To Me'

This is indeed a very special book to me because I was working on it while celebrating my first year (and Mother's Day) as a mum. Each page opening is of a different baby animal with their mum. It was really one of those dream-come-true books that came at exactly the right time in my life. I was able to pour so much motherly emotion into it (even on very little sleep sometimes!) and this book will always be dear to my heart.

I'll be having a book launch for it at the Hill of Content Bookshop in Melbourne in May, (curiously, just in time for Mother's Day, imagine that) and then some of the illustrations will be exhibited at the Hunt Club Gallery in Deer Park as well as back at the HoC later in the year. So stay tuned for details on those!

I really hope you like both the website and the book. I've worked hard on both of them. Really I have! It's no joke, even though it's April Fool's Day! (also the day my parents got married. Fitting somehow...)

This month's assignment for MATS Bootcamp was to create a pattern design for the Bolt Fabric market. Topic: Jelly!

I can't say I was super excited by this one. I decided to go for a 70s food theme instead, plus a 70s palette along with it.

here are some sketches….





and here's how it ended up….



Once again I am not terribly happy with this. I have been trying to push myself to work a new way - I've been scanning in my drawings, tracing them in Illustrator and adding colour digitally. But I'm realising that this isn't really what is me. I am keen to use my digital skills but I don't think I am going about it the right way.

and here, I was thinking about what OTHER people might like as opposed to what I would like. 70s palette? so not me. Yes it is good to push yourself and try new things, the trick is remaining true to yourself in the process.

MATS Part B is coming up next month. With a new perspective now, I am going to take it on with the style which I love that I have been cultivating for the last 5-10 years, but freshening it up with some new tips from the course. If I'm going to start doing something in a new style, I want it to come organically, as opposed to forcing myself to do something in a way which doesn't quite feel right, or feel like me.

so, as always…. bring it on….!

Coming soon to a website near you…


Some major revamping going on behind the scenes at kimflemingillustration.com.

stay tuned-- a few more practice sessions and we'll be ready to rock the house! :-)

Our assignment for this month was to create art for an iPhone cover.

Princes Bridge with 'White Night' being spray painted live with different designs

Life drawing marathon at National Gallery of Victoria

'Tattooed City' pictorial projections on NGV

Busker's bike on fire :)

Awesome light projections onto Flinders Street Station and along Swanston St (below)

More fun light shows in the city

I do love Melbourne :-)

So I decided to keep the momentum going from MATS, and have signed up for Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp. It is the same premise as MATS where we have a 'mini' assignment to warm up and then a 'main assignment' to conquer, but on a more realistic timeframe: monthly instead of weekly.

Hope your new year will be ROCKIN!

I am very excited about the New Year. 2013 was a very difficult year personally and I am happy to see it finish. I have a few things on the boil for 2014 and am hoping one or more of them will bubble up make some really yummy gnocchi.

A few pots:

My new book will be out in April!

I'm excited to expand on what I learned in the illustration course I did last year and to take Part B in March.

I'll be going to the national Australian SCBWI conference in July (never been before!)

I'm working on a dummy of a my OWN manuscript. (eek!)

I'm having fun doing little guys like Rocky Raccoon here.


Here's hoping 2014 is a wonderful year for us all, with lots of joy, laughter, love and creativity. (and gnocchi!)