Very excited to announce that two of my recent projects have been longlisted in the WIA competition. There are 500 entries on the longlist, chosen from over 4,300 entries. Hurrah!
One of my projects that is nominated is my COPE floods illustrated picture book…
And the other is my HK Willow Pattern ceramics collection in green and gold. You can see the entry here.
The shortlist will be announced in June. Fingers crossed!
Together with my nieces, I’ve designed a page of black and white drawings that can be coloured in. You can click here for the pdf download. It’s A4 size, but should also work for US sized paper.
My favourite drawings on the page are these tarantulas. See if you can find them!
Please send me pics of your coloured pages, I’d love to see!
Before they took a break for the Easter holidays, I started doing art classes with my two nieces (ages 5 and 8) over skype. I’d never done this before, and have been learning all about how long their attention span is, what they’ll focus on, and how much they can take of their aunt talking at them! Here are some of the lessons that went well.
We looked at Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting, and discussed the shapes, colours and textures…
I took it back a step and we drew fruit from life, focussing on the shadows. I wanted them to experiment with different softnesses of pencils, and grasp shading…
…which led to looking at Cezanne’s apples, and again looking at shadows and colours. Without realising it they’ve taken in 3-dimensional drawing. Yay!
We switched to watercolour and looked at shape and colour and light. I love how they’ve interpreted this painting! Monet would be proud…
I’ve been thinking of more lesson ideas and looking forward to starting up lessons again!
* credits: top left, famous painting, top right, me. Bottom left, Sascha (6), bottom right, Isla (8).
Even during this ongoing pandemic in the world, it has made me happy to watch Spring arrive, and here in Tokyo, the cherry blossoms bloomed for a beautiful few weeks. I couldn’t go far, but managed to find many sakura trees within walking distance of our home. Here are some of my favourite shots of the cherryblossom this year.
I even made a pie, and covered it with sakura blossom pastry. Here’s a photo of it with the cherry tree underneath our balcony in the background!
There was a weird day when the temperature dropped and it snowed intensely for a few hours. Sakura and snow!
Hope you’re staying safe and staying indoors. Take care!
I’ve been redoing my CV and going through old folders in search of obscure things I can’t remember, and I found the link to this book about the Art in MTR stations in HK. Here’s the page about me and my work for Cheung Sha Wan station. You can download the whole book here, and see all the other projects too!
I hope that when we can all start travelling again, you’ll make it to HK and see the actual station. Here’s a picture to whet your appetite…
Unfortunately due to the current COVID-19 situation, I’ve postponed my exhibition. I’m hoping to hold it in late summer/early autumn. Fingers crossed we can get through this all safely. Hope you’re staying at home and staying healthy.
I’m working on the new COPE disaster champions book at the moment, hoping to get it done asap so we can get it out there and help educate kids about cyclones!
Here are some of the drawings for the book, done in pen and ink. I draw and redraw, trying to get exactly the right expressions and features…
There are several new aspects of the COPE teams life that we get to learn about in this book. They have chickens for example!
Hope you’ll see the finished books soon…
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!
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.
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.
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!
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…
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!
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!
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!
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…
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!
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!
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!
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!
