It was my dad’s birthday last week, and I made him this card. He makes delicious marmalade (I spelled it wrong on the card, duh) which I wanted to celebrate!
These are the sketches I made, as I worked out the final design…
Happy birthday dad!
solo show!
I’m so excited to announce that I’m having a solo show in Tokyo next month! I’m busily preparing for it, and even hope to have a brand new print ready in time.
It will be at the lovely Almost Perfect and I’ll be showing all sorts of work: mostly mokuhanga prints and etchings, but also some of my ceramics, hand-made sketchbooks, postcards etc. Hope you’ll come by and say hello. I’ll be there the whole time it’s open.
flea market
I visited Kasai jinja flea market recently, on the edge of Tokyo. There were only a few stalls, but I loved the large mature trees on the shrine grounds, and spent a pleasant morning wandering around and sketching…
There’s something special about the way shrines always have greenery, and the trees are a welcome rest in Tokyo’s urban sprawl.
Ogawa washi
Last week I went to Ogawa in Saitama, with my friends Megan and Liz, who are setting up a new online Japanese paper store in Sweden (Japanese Paper Company). They wanted to visit some local papermakers, and learn about the special hosokawa washi that is the local superstar paper.
First we went to see a local community facility where they were stripping the mulberry bark and cleaning it for the first stage of the washi-making process… I even tried it myself. It wasn’t hard, but I could see how time-consuming it would be to get enough kozo (Mulberry) for a year’s worth of paper! The bark can only be harvested in the winter, so they collect enough and dry it for use throughout the year.
We went to another facility to see them actually making the paper, and visited a local craft store (I stocked up on paper!) It’s very physical manual work to mix the paper pulp in water vats and then use screens to produce the individual sheets…
We went to see a local washi artist called Hisako san, and spoke to her about the paper she makes. Her little studio was wonderful and it was obvious how much love and care she puts into her work.
I’d like to say a big thank you to Seiko Musashi who was our guide though all this. If you want to visit too, and learn about Japanese washi paper, just give her a call!
Eating Well Magazine
I did some line illustrations for Eating Well Magazine in the US recently. It was fun to think about how to match the themes and content of the quite serious articles into simple illustrations incorporated into photographs.
I always love drawing food and ingredients, and putting them together in interesting ways…
Coronavirus COPE poster
The COPE team is based in China, so I think it’s important that they help kids understand what to do during this current Coronavirus epidemic. I made this single image poster with straight-forward advice about how to stay safe.
The very most important message of all:
Stay safe and healthy everyone!
special edition Hong Kong ceramics
This is a special, limited edition collection of my HK and Kowloon Willow pattern ceramics, made for Chinese New Year, 2020. It’s in greens, with lovely shiny rose gold details.
They are available exclusively at Lane Crawford in HK.
The collection features a two-tier cake tray featuring the HK design plate on the top level, and the Kowloon plate on the lower level.
There is also a set of two espresso cups with saucers, one of HK and one of Kowloon…
And then a dinner plate set of both HK and Kowloon plates.
All the pieces are made of fine bone china and the gold is a new detail I’ve never tried before.
Hope you’ll enjoy using them!
Chinese New Year
Today is the start of the Lunar New Year in the Chinese calendar, so I hope you’ll be out enjoying a fantastic meal somewhere.
This is the new year card I made for the Keswick Foundation charity. Happy year of the Rat, the beginning of the 12 year horoscope cycle, and therefore an auspicious year!
yakitori sketch
Sometimes there’s time when eating out in Japan, to sketch the food prep that happens, and I love that! Here’s a little sketch I made this week, while enjoying a wonderful yakitori meal…
visible mending
I accidentally shrunk one of my favourite jumpers, and realised it would fit my 8-year-old niece! Before I gave it to her I mended 2 little moth holes by embroidering hearts over them…
I like the current trend for visible mending. I tried it on my cardigan too, but maybe that wasn’t such a success!
Yamanashi visit - holidays
Over the winter holidays we went on a little trip to a ryokan called Keiunkan in Yamanashi. It’s the holder of the Guinness world record for the longest running inn in the world, there’s been a hot spring inn on the site since 750AD!
It was a beautiful and peaceful place, and the food was stunning, as well as delicious. I sketched, wrote letters, read books…
I went to each of the six different onsens, and my favourite was this outdoor rotemburo, which I often managed to have to myself. It was -6C in the evenings, and the chill air and the hot water was a wonderful combination.
I sat out on our little balcony, cooling down after a hot bath, and sketched the mountain views…
It was the perfect place to have a total rest and wind down at the end of the year!
happy new year!
We had a traditional Japanese end of year, and ate long soba noodles (Toshikoshi Soba) on New Year’s Eve…
… and made my grandmother’s recipe osechi New Year meal…
and even had some handmade (but this time not by me) omochi rice cakes with a mikan on top to celebrate.
Hurrah! And oshougatsu omedeto to you all!
Happy Christmas!
Here’s my Christmas card this year, best wishes to you all, and hope everyone has a restful and refreshing holiday season.
I started this design with some rough sketches of ideas to show the family home in London, and we chose the fireplace version, rather than the front door.
The Christmas stockings represent the original Jesse family, and the kokeshi dolls on the fireplace represent my brother and his family, and the snowmen are me and my husband. I wanted to create a traditional, warm and cosy feeling, and yet also make it personal to my family.
This shows the progress of my watercolour artwork for the final card, with the addition of a cat (in memory of our beloved Smudge) and then orange and yellow on top of the blue, to add some winter fireside warmth. I tried to limit the colour palette so the key elements of the illustration would stand out. The final image has the colour increased in saturation, and I removed the potted plant on the left, as it wasn’t clear what it was in the final crop. Hope you like it.
Warm winter wishes to you all!
UK trip
I’ve just got back from 10 days in London, where I visited family and friends. It’s a magical place at Christmastime, even in the rain and chill…
We had an early family Christmas and ate wonderful food and opened gifts. Looking forward to my second Christmas in Japan now! Hope you’re all getting ready for some quality holiday time…
HK trip
It’s been an emotional and exhausting week in HK. I had many meetings, most memorable of which was the one for COPE at the HK Observatory. We had a tour of the building, and saw where they track storms and the weather. Amazing! In such a beautiful old colonial building…
I attended several Christmas fairs where faux were selling my HK ceramics…
… managed to find some time to admire the wonderful HK views!
I visited the newly revamped HK Museum of Art in Kowloon, and did some sketches in the Chinese antiquities gallery…
and was super happy to see my HK ceramic range for sale in the wonderful shop. Hurrah for HK!
I hope I can get back three soon…
Himitsu zine
I painted some watercolour illustrations for the annual ToCo published zine, this year entitled Himitsu, and we held a launch event for it last weekend. Thank you to everyone who made it there!
I created a series of images about a set of stairs I walk down on my way to work.
I included a little handwritten text about my thoughts and integrated them in the images.
It was really interesting to try something so different from my usual work. And focus on a single thing to work a narrative around…
I hope to join in again next year!
Nagano trip
I’ve just got back from a week away in the Nagano countryside. It was a much needed rest, and a time to fill my eyes with the splendours of the Japanese Autumn.
We stayed at the Ryokan Nakadanasou, in a small town called Komoro, on the Eastern edge of Nagano. It was a little Japanese slice of perfection. The momiji trees were superbly red, the styling was minimal, and the onsen had local apples bobbing about in it, which gave a wonderful gentle appley scent to the whole bathroom. Bliss.
After a relaxing overnight at the ryokan, we drove on to the foothills of the Southern Yatsugatake mountains, to our rented cabin. The view of the koyo Autumnal colours was delightful, and the burbling of the river going by in the distance was all you could hear…
The weather was cold and rainy, and then cold and brilliantly sunny. We stayed in, cooked meals, and kept warm by the fire…
This sort of holiday is good for my imagination, and I had time to think about artwork I want to make, as well as catch up on current projects..
The pretty little still-lives around the cabin enticed me to draw also…
The listing for the cabin we stayed in on airbnb is here, in case anyone in Tokyo needs a little R & R.
soba-making
I learned how to make soba last week, on a belated birthday gift course, it was really fun. There’s something very clean and beautiful about buckwheat flour and noodles…
I loved the whole process, and although I didn’t quite get a handle on the kneading, I absolutely adored chopping the dough into noodles…
At the end I did a taste-test of the noodles I made and also some fo the off-cuts. Delicious! I recommend a course like this to everyone!
Porquerolles map
I haven’t shown any maps recently, and I was thinking about the summer, and remembered this pretty little map I created for Conde Nast Traveller in the UK a while ago.
You can read the full article here, but be warned, it will make you want to go and take a holiday there immediately!
COPE website
The new COPE website has just launched!
Everyone can download each of the books for free. Please read them and give them to your friends. It’s important to have this knowledge!
Hope you enjoy reading about our COPE characters and stories, as well as learning some useful disaster risk reduction techniques.