COPE COVID-19

Today we launched the newest COPE book! It has been endorsed by unicef, who will be distributing it in the Asia Pacific region. Author Martha Keswick and Editor Tim Sim spoke about the project on a live webinar in Singapore, and were joined by Marc Ruben of unicef.

The book was written with advice and input from a variety of university professors from around the world, and will be distributed in the currently badly coronavirus-affected regions of South East Asia. It features the lock-down diaries of children in various countries, speaking about their experiences during this global pandemic.

This is a difficult and confusing time for children everywhere, but we tried to show the positive attitude and resilience that we all need to successfully navigate these times.

The book will be available to download for free on monday, from the COPE website. Stay safe everyone!

Night Garden

I’ve been working on a mokuhanga print for a while, much more complex than my usual, and it took weeks for me to complete the carving. It’s a floral, entitled ‘Night Garden’, and is made as a repeat pattern.

I designed it to be printed with sumi ink, for a collaborative project with the mokuhangasisters collective. It will be part of an eight print scroll. With the prints that didn’t quite make the cut for the final edition, I made some hand-bound sketchbooks, using the prints as the covers.

I’m very happy with this edition of prints, it just felt so good putting the final prints together and sending them off.

I did some experimental pieces using the offcuts of the prints, trying a bit of weaving and collage…

And then I printed the block in a variety of greens, to have some versions to frame for my exhibition later this year (hopefully). And made some more little sketchbooks! I’ll be selling these at my show too…

anniversary

This month was my 7th wedding anniversary. I made an embroidered card to showcase wool, as the traditional gift for this year.

We couldn’t go out for a meal, so we made ourselves a special afternoon tea at home. We dressed up and had our own private anniversary with cakes, scones and chelsea buns!.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend at home too.

COPE Cyclones book

The newly launched COPE Cyclones book has a trailer!

So happy that it’s now out there in the world. You can go to the COPE website here, and read it! These are the books we’ve done so far, with more on the way.

I’m working on a special book about COVID-19 next. Watch this space!

WIA longlisted!

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!

the Amazing Jungle colouring page

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!

skype lessons

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).

sakura season

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!

HK MTR station

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…

my exhibition postponed

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.

COPE Cyclones

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…

dad's birthday card

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.

The inari foxes and white paper shide are my favourite things in the shrines…

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…