Half way there!!

A while ago  I wrote about my 'activity' piece and at the moment I'm about half way through joining it (and 9 months into producing it). Hoping to get it almost finished for the 'art matters' show in October (I'll be 9 days of the finish date). I've worked out the final dimensions should be around 16 x 12 x 35 cm stacked and 16 x 4380 cm fully extended - so probably not much chance of ever seeing it completely opened!

Back to the drawing board!



Final 2 image publications uploaded and linked to my blog and website. I have quite a few large drawings still undocumented but I shall probably wait until after my Derby Museum show next year to sort them out. As I have a number of exhibitions in the pipeline  I'm trying to make sure that they all have different work which is involving a bit of juggling and a fair bit of making so time to get back to the drawing board!!

First issuu publication!

What a fantastic site!! I've just uploaded my first test publication (needs some additional work like text!) and embedded it down on the right. Haven't worked out how to make it fit the sidebar yet but early days - and it does seem to work!

On-line frenzy....

Over the last week or so I've been concentrating on streamlining and redesigning on-line stuff - website/ blog etc and set up my digital sketchbook. At the same time I've been discussing with a fellow artist ideas for an on line catalogue - we've got a group exhibition in October and want to do something visual and accessible. I've been thinking for a while about doing some on-line promotional booklets/ catalogues (portfolio of work, exhibition info etc.) but don't want to spend lots of money on printing. I have software to produce pdf's but I really wanted a format where the pages 'turned' and I really, really didn't want to have to learn any complicated software!!. Whilst researching possibilities I came across issuu.com which looks absolutely ideal. It looks as if I can do the layout and design, upload it and it will do all the complicated stuff for me. Also lots of really interesting publications to download/ read/ explore. Going to do a sample over the next few days to test it out....

sketchbook bits and pieces

All the bits and pieces for inside my digital sketchbook. Just got to start using it now!

Digital Sketchbook


I've been playing around with the idea of a digital sketch book......but I wanted one which would let me stick/ staple and generally add bits and pieces as well as type, write and draw. Think I've found the answer....time will tell....so far all I've done is the front cover!

Drawing dialogues


Hopefully a couple of drawing dialogues coming up this year during Big Draw in October. A group of us are having an exhibition at the LCB depot in Leicester where artists exhibiting will give a talk about the role drawing plays in their work. Derby Big Draw (organised by Beth Heaney) is also hopefully having a drawing dialogues event at Quad, all very exciting!

New blog AND new website!


After much thought about my online presence I decided to merge my two blogs, firstly to make life easier (it means I only have one to update!) and secondly because Blogger have recently introduced 'pages' and updated their templates which makes it much more versatile. I also decided that I should have my name in the url to make it easier to find and so I set up  a completely new blog and imported both of the older ones. However, I then realised that my web home page linked to one of my old blogs.... In theory I should have been able to just change the old link, but due to a number of factors (change of computer, old software...) this wasn't going to be as easy as it sounded so I made the decision to design a new website from scratch. I decided to keep it really simple and to make sure it loaded onto smart phones/ i-phones as well as on computer and to make it as easy as possible to update. It's now up and running here. I still have a lot of work to do, on the images page in particular, but it's a start!!

In progress...