Bob Foundation wrapping book

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My favourite bit about Christmas is wrapping the gifts. I often wrap other people's gifts too! My friends Bob Foundation in Tokyo have just published a new book about wrapping. I love wrapping!  They asked me to demonstrate my wrapping powers, and here I am in the book, with my specially wrapped Bob gift.I used to dream about being the gift-wrapping person in the department stores in Japan....

show continues this weekend...

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Thank you to everyone who braved the cold to make it to our private view last night! Helene Turbe makes delicate jewellery, Aude Van Ryn makes decorative ceramics, I have etchings and woodblock prints on show, and Romilly Graham has bold colourful ceramics. The show continues this weekend, 11am-5pm both saturday and sunday. We'd love to see you!

Three Good Things again...

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I've just seen this lovely little video of Hugh, talking about his new book. You can see some of my illustrations as he flips through the pages, and there's even a nice close-up of the endpapers. Enjoy!I've been cooking out of this book for a while now, and have to say it's superb. Might make a good gift for a chef in the family!

Lane Crawford shopping weekend

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This weekend (1/2 Dec) I'm creating personalised Christmas cards in store as part of the Lane Crawford GIFTED Shopping Weekend in Hong Kong.I'm in the homeware section at Pacific Place. Customers can choose one of my designs, or ask for something special, and I create a one-off original card. Here are some I made earlier...Hope you can pop in and say hello!

Hong Kong teaset

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I'm in Hong Kong at the moment, and have just popped in to Tree, a large friendly eco-homeware store, that has started selling my HK Toile teasets.I chatted with the sales assistants and they told me they're selling extremely well, hurrah!Hope you can pop in to see them. The HK toile products are also on sale through kapok, HKTDC, HK Museum of Art shop, inside, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel shop.

moon bear merchandise

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My charity project this year was for Animals Asia, which is devoted to the welfare of wild and urban animals in Asia, and also works towards the conservation of endangered species. Because I love bears, I specifically worked with them on their Moon Bear Rescue campaign, where they save and support bears rescued from bile farms in China. I've designed four products for the charity, and all the proceeds go towards helping the wonderful moon bears. The collection has just been launched in time for Christmas orders. My personal favourite is the ladies large scarf, featuring four lovely bears in pretty patterns,and this is my most favourite bear of them all...Moon bears have that name because of the distinctive crescent of lighter fur on their fronts. I've played with this 'moon' symbolism in my designs, placing the bears in the night sky, like constellations, for both the scarf and the foldable bag. I did a simple solitary bear on a moon for the ladies t-shirt, and a sequential drawing of a bear being let out of a cage to freedom, for the folding umbrella.You can order everything from the Animals Asia website shop, and they'll ship worldwide. Help us save the moon bears !

Sweet Anthology

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I love sweets. I've always loved sweets, and I'm fascinated by unusual and exotic confectionery everywhere. So when a friend asked me if I'd like to collaborate on a new venture for her sweet company Chorley & Baker, I jumped at the chance! Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce 'Sweet Anthology'.To suit this high-end brand, I created the illustrated label and hand-wrote the name for the identity in a classic, slightly baroque style, but kept a modern feel. The colourful sweets are packaged in high-quality designer jars, and the label needed to work with each variety of colours.We've created the brand to have collections, like a fashion house, and we're launching with an A/W collection of 42 varieties, focusing on traditional British sweets. We'll be refining these, and adding new flavours each season.The website for the brand is full of gorgeous photographs, and I created a muted leafy background to highlight the bright jewel-like sweets. I also drew some fun little illustrated characters interacting with the sweets.We're doing a soft launch on achica that starts on monday (29 October), with the prices slightly discounted (let me know if you want to buy them, I have a discount code for first time buyers). After that we'll be selling through our online shop, and in fancy stores near you soon! Give them a try, they make the perfect gift...

last chance to 'heart' my designs

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My collaborative T-shirt design project for OuterEdit has just finished, and I'm super happy with the designs I made. I took bits from everyone's artwork and created something surprising and Mariko-style out of them...My favourite themes that came up through the collaborative process were the fox, the stag, and the heart symbol. I played with these to create my designs.Only the top 5 'hearted' designs will actually be produced as T-shirts, so please take the time to go to the site, register, and vote vote vote! There are a few days left to vote before a decision is made. Thank you!

Outer Edit half-way through

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So far I've done 2 new images for this project, making use of several other artists' bits of artwork. In the first, I directly used Aude's fox mask and Kahori's flower to complement my bird branch theme:In the next round, I didn't use the others' actual artwork, but was inspired to draw my own stag (thanks Hiromi!) and fox. I made a little scenario with its own Latin motto "a true friend is a rare bird".Keep voting, and some of these t-shirts could become real!

Sketchbook Project - London

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My cutlery proverb sketchbook for the Art House Co-op is on its world tour, and will be in London next week!  All the European and Australian sketchbooks will be available to view at The Canada Water Library on these days at these times:

Oct. 12th 4pm-8pm Oct. 13th 11am-5pm Oct. 15th - 19th 4pm-8pm

Hope you can make it along!

OuterEdit starting soon!

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I blogged about this a few months ago, and now it's finally here, the collaborative project for OuterEdit is about to start... They came to London and filmed a little video of me and here it is. I'm a little bit freaked out by how I look/sound, but there you go.

OuterEdit - FC04 - Mariko Jesse from OuterEdit on Vimeo.

Our 'collab' starts on October 9th, and my collaborators on this project will be illustrators Aude Van Ryn, David Humphries, Kahori Maki, and Bob Foundation. They're all amazing and I hope you'll check out the OuterEdit website and see what we produce together!

Max and Mei website

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A fab new website has been launched for the Max and Mei series of bi-lingual children's books I illustrated. The books are Mandarin-English and really great fun. The new site features all the characters from the books, and all sorts of interesting interactive stuff.You can hear the stories being read aloud,and play some fun language games (I was ok at the numbers, not so great at the word matching!)

The website has lots of (educational!) playful stuff for kids of any age.

The original books are based on Max and Mei meeting all the creatures in the Chinese zodiac. In the newest book they meet a dinasaur (sort of!) The books are available direct from the publisher PPP in Hong Kong, and amazon everywhere else. Enjoy!

Hugh's Three Good Things

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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new cookbook is here!Published by Bloomsbury in the UK, there are lovely illustrations by me, and gorgeous photographs by Simon Wheeler, all laid out by the wonderful art director Lawrence Morton.I've created illustrations of the ingredients in watercolour and pen & ink, and there are also some fun collages of Hugh interacting with illustrated elements, like this...I love that I can incorporate a slightly surreal element into the photos...and also play around with the recipe text a little.I've done some hand-written text in the cookbook for the first time too...The contents page is my favourite! Here's a corner...You can buy the book from the River Cottage amazon page or any good bookstore, and there is even a kindle/ipad version (but with less pictures, just so you know). You can also get more information on the River Cottage website, and there are some sample pages you can view in full here. Yum....