What Birds are REALLY Thinking...... 2!

Although I am trying to buy a flat in London with my husband and am therefore filled with a constant gut tearing terror and dispair, there are good and exciting things happening which are good and exciting. 

Mostly I am happy and excited that I have finished the second edition of What Birds Are Really Thinking. Here exclusively and for the first time I will show you some pictures. 

This has been in the pipeline for a while, moving between back and front burners to make way for aforementioned housing angst and other exciting projects such as those detailed in my last post.

The first edition of What Birds Are Really Thinking, including spoonbills thinking about Britney Spears and starlings thinking about soft furnishings is my all time bestselling thing that I have made (apart from the Magpies print). In addition to being one of the very first things I made after moving to London to seek my fortune as an illustrator back in 2008.

 And this edition is soooooooo much better.

 I decided to revisit the topic in 2015 as an excuse to make some multimedia work and draw birds (my favourite things) and as a promotional follow up to the launch of my new website (jennyrobins.com). Much as I have a fondness for the original zine, this second issue really does show how far I've come in terms of skill and design. I will be sending these out as a mailer in the next month with a few postcards I also have in the pipeworks. 

 If you fancy owning your own copy, they are available here, or pop me an email if you can think of a good reason why I should send you one for free.  

In other good news, the event June and I organised for the Big Draw back in October/November 2014 has won a runners up award in the Drawing Inspiration Awards. That's good eh? We are going to the awards ceremony and will probably wear nice dresses, definitely do some live drawing and possibly make a speech (appropriatness of speech not yet confirmed.) I've announced the news officially on the Storyhands site here. 

This is me taking a short break from running the Sketchbook Scavenger Hunt in my F(Art)S T-shirt. This is what it looks like to be AWARD WINNING. 

2014 highlights - trips, events, drawings, fun times and adventures.

Can it be 2015 already? It seems like only a year ago it was 2013. 

In factuality I tend to think of years in the academic sense (September to August), so I am always confusing people with my use of last years and next years. THIS year though, I definitely did some things that are worth recalling in blog form I'm sure, even if I have to triple check the dates to make sure of what actually happened in the year of two thousand and fourteen. 

It's been a busy year and a number of those things I didn't even get around to blogging, so there should be some surprises too. I shall be vaguely chronological. 

A quick look at my calendar tells me that in January of 2014 I went to see the Light Princess, the brilliant alternative fairytale musical by Tori Amos

It was awesome.

I also went to Budapest. That was also awesome.

Alex had a beard at the time. 

I also ran a little valentines competition to help choose which of my long running series of collage cards got printed, culminating in 8 favourites becoming commercially available 

(and I'm sure I'll be shoving them down your throats again in no time as I still have some of the stock left you lucky lucky people).

In February, I made my first visit to Jumble and Pearls, who I revisited twice over the course of the year, it's such a lovely bunch of creatives to work with I can't actually believe it's been less than a year, and hope to do more events with Rosalia and co this year coming. 

Also in February I saw the estimable Sir Quentin Blake talk about drawing beyond the page and wrote about it for Amelia. The best part of this story which I'm not sure if I mentioned at the time, is that the legendary illustrator himself actually sent an email to thank me for the post - that's pretty amazingly cool right? He said I was a good listener. 

Also in February I saw War Horse

Joooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!

In March I turned 29 (avec cocktails) and did some fashion illustrations

Cocktails.

Vita Gottlieb A/W 2014 

According to my calender I was reading Bourdieu at the time, or at least, I needed to return some to the library. 

In April I went to the MALDIVES. 

For mine and Alex's official honeymoon. It was pretty ****ing idyllic. 

As soon as we got back I was full tilt into preparing the first of two events organised by StoryHands this year - our workshop at Tate Modern with Tate Collective, which took place on the 3rd of May.

Myself, June Sees and Antonia Parker (fellow StoryHands veterans, I've known both these amazing ladies since the early days of my London illumastrating) organised a tour of the Matisse Cut Outs exhibition for groups of young people, then got them creating with a series of activities based on the themes of the show. For me this was as much about a fluidity of process as it was about colours and shapes, Matisse's work in his later life shows such sensitivity to the power of simple composition and imaginative serendipity. It was also a fabulous opportunity of course to work with such a prestigious organisation and with such exciting artwork. The vibrant and varied work our young collaborators came up with was fantastic and I think we were pretty successful in evoking the spirit of Matisse's Vence Studio. You can read a lot more about the event in my write up for the StoryHands blog here.

Here's me, pontificating on my own productive processes. And here's just a small selection of some of the work that got made on the tables, walls and windows of the inspirational room Tate provided us with for the workshop. 

I always have to make something with a bird. 

(no really, ask my students. ALWAYS.) 

So I made this bird, seen here with the Globe and the Walkie Talkie. 

In May I did live drawing at a burlesque and variety night in Hoxton, and completed work on Katie and Elliot's wedding stationary, both of which I have blogged at a decent length recently, so I won't elaborate, except to say that both were very satisfying and fun commissions. 

One thing I don't think I did mention here was this other cool thing I did for the lovely couple's big day - a watercolour portrait in front of the church used as a guest book at the reception. I needed to put this together from a number of fittings and hair rehearsal photos in the week before the wedding, so it was all a little manic and last minute. But it came together nicely, and happily the weather on the day matched the sunshine I painted!

A lot of the summer was taken up with thesis writing as I came to the end of my MA in Art and Design Education, but I did manage to fit in a few weddings, some portraits, visits to shows and exhibitions including a late night viewing of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition at which I drew this sketch of  Gabby Young and her band performing amongst the artworks.

At the same event, my sister Hazel and I experienced our first silent disco. Which was excellent. 

In August, and sensibly just before my thesis deadline, I went to the Green Man Festival in Whales. We slept in a really cold tent and ate a vast variety of world cuisines out of disposable containers and saw bands and stuff. I took quite a lot of mirror sunglasses selfies. 

In September I started a new part time art teaching job working in North West London which is going well.

In October and November StoryHands hosted our second great event of the year - a sketchbook scavenger hunt in the City of London as part of the Big Draw festival. 

June and I led groups on a little walk from the Monument to the Great Fire of London to Postman's Park, with stops in between taking in some hidden gems of the city and challenging our guests to discover and draw there. I've already done three write ups of the event and I'm getting a bit repetative, but if you're interested you can read ALL about it here on the StoryHands site, and see LOTS (and I do mean lots) of pictures. If you do follow me on some of the social medias, you've probably heard all about it already. 

Here we are beginning the first walk with some spiel on looking and on appreciating our great capital.

I had a lot of fun doing these walks and it was so great to see our planning and preperation pay off in all the brilliant drawings made by participants of all ages. Although the decision to have two walks on each day - one family friendly one in the afternoon and one adults only with added pub crawl in the evening meant those two Saturdays were certainly long and exhausting for us, I think it was a good decision to do both as it really gave us the opportunity to meet and work with a great mix of people, including old friends and illustrators, but also new friends from lots of backgrounds and professions. We didn't change the tasks or the approach much in each walk and, while there were a lot of individual approaches, everyone embraced the challenges and made great drawings. 

After the success of our first Saturday of drawing, we attracted the attention of the director of the Campaign for Drawing, Sue Grayson Ford, who came to our second family walk to join in with our activities - what an honour! I've also been invited to write a piece on the experience for AN Magazine, so I think that we can safely call this event even more successful than the first. 

Also in October  I attended a conference on drawing at the British Museum, dressed as a bat for Halloween and took a sneaky trip to the Red Sea. In November I took a large number of children on a trip to the Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museums in Oxford. I could actually spend a week in that building (a cathedral to science, FYI) looking at all the things, it's so good, you should definitely go there if you have the chance. 

The Natural History museum is full of amazing animals and natural forms, while the Pitt Rivers is full of astonishing cultural artefacts. 

In the last few months I have been working on revamping my website, which is ALMOST FINISHED. Honest. That will be the next thing. Also I have completed a four page comic based on a collaged found text story which is in the new issue of Meanwhile... from Soaring Penguin Press. I don't think I'm allowed to publish it all here but here are some sneaky pics. 

Clicky the links if you would like to buy a copy. 

It's a fancy dress love story. With zombies.

Also in the last few months I was working on an epic musical collage project creating lyrics pages and design work for The New Tabloids new album Good News. This was a bit of a departure for me because the work was almost totally abstract rather than figurative, but a lot of fun because for each song I was able to work on communicating the themes and feel of the music through the use of different colours and collage materials. Again at this point I can only show you a sneaky peek, but keep an eye out for the imminent release of the entire album, I'm sure I'll be bigging it up on the media of social.

To conclude the triumvarate of recent projects combining text collage and imagery, I also did this poem about the enduring mythical image of the witch in popular imagination for Amelia Gregory's new book That Which We Do Not Understand. This is a fabtasticly beautiful publication with luscious gold foil printing and lots of exciting artwork, so I definitely recommend getting your hands on a copy. If that is still possible, of which I am not sure. 

Well that was quite a lot of stuff, but then I guess a year is quite a long time really. 

Here's a few of the many sketchbook scavenger hunt pictures to finish off my yearly round up. 

Anna and Fran!

Hopefully 2015 will have as many adventures as 2014, keep your eyes open for my imminent website relaunch, and here's wishing you and yours all of the good things and success in your endeavours. 

Happy New Year.

Parp. I have too many things to blog about 

So. 

This month's top news in pictures?

I drew portraits of people in a caravan covered in Heisenburg's face. I blogged about it here for StoryHands. I don't like Breaking Bad, please send your outraged postcards to...

for a limited time only you can buy some of my pictures on OhhDeer on mobile phone covers (!) iphone and galaxy here, here  and here . Also on some nice Giclee prints here,  here and here and on canvas here 

I made these birthday cards. You can buy them here

I got my sister to get my cat (by association only now really, as I haven't lived with her for many years) to  pick the winner to my pet portrait giveaway. That was cool. Emma won. 

I also did some portraits at a Pop Up Vintage Fair. I might actually blog about that though, COMING SOON ISN'T IT. I might also blog about my wedding invites that I designed for my wedding. 

So I have spent quite a lot of my time recently running and promoting the New Year's Eve postcard set we did at StoryHands for the start of 2013. 

We each did a postcard design on the new year's theme. this was mine.

Although saying YES more is a valid and appropriate new year's resolution, I'm not really sure it's mine. Sometimes I feel like it should be to say YES less. Blah blah how do you balance workload, should you work for free, do you believe in life after love etc. Saying yes does tend to lead to more interesting things than saying no tho, obviously. see my feeling blessed post. 

We did a big Epic Giveaway competition for people to win some, as well as some other awesome stuff 

If you missed it i apologise, but i was going on about it A LOT. Although not, i realise, here, sorry. 

People posted some really good new year's resolutions which are more valid and awesome than say yes more. My faves were:

stop secretly believing that texts from unknown numbers are actually from ghosts (from Becky), visit Seattle (from Fran), hold a barn owl (from Ali - she won!), get more tattoos (from Clare). 

lots were on the theme of have more adventures and do more illustration (it's like our friends have stuff in common with us or something), i also particularly liked that Hazel's was to become domestically competent, but Angela's was to hire a cleaner. Maybe she could hire Hazel, after the competence materialises. 

I done drew the winners out of a metaphorical internet hat and wrote about it here.

Also it's kind of cool that Ali won, (i genuinly did do the random number thing) as the first ever postcard set i did was for her exhibition. 

best of 2012 obviously

This time last year I wrote a fairly comprehensive post on my thoughts about  Making Things for Other People

This year my feelings are much the same, though I'm busy for different reasons, Christmas is still awesome and I still love making things for people. This year I made some unique kindle cases following this tutorial  and including some of my own painting and bookbinding nowse. I also decorated a number of notebooks on the theme of birds beginning with the same letter as the gift receivers name, here are 4 of my faves;

who knows, maybe some day I'll do a whole alphabet's worth, it's not like that's been done before. 

2012 has been a good year for me

I completed my NQT year (blood, sweat, tears etc.) and got a better part time teaching job than I had dared to hope for at the end of it. I went to Amsterdam, Disneyland Paris and the south of France, not to mention Margate, learnt to carve soapstone and to create giant sculptures out of just newspaper and glue.

I saw some Olympics, some awesome plays, exhibitions, musicians, football and even some good tv. I painted a mural and a huge amount of live portraits. I co-founded an illustration collective and started my own pet portrait business. 

I drew all of my friends beginning with F and G and a bunch of celebrities who are still under-wraps. I drew and wrote about fashion and other things, designed logos, cushion covers, cards and comics. I drew dancing deities, teapots, weddings, tigers, orchestras, huskies in party hats and two sexy cowboys riding a giant walrus. 

I do have an official new year's resolution, about which more later, but looking through my albums and folders to make this post, I have noticed though a worrying list of people I love that I don't seem to have seen much, if at all this year, which is sad. What's really needed for a new year's resolution is I think a list of people I need to see before this time next year. 

so it's looking like summer is pretty much over right? Although that didn't stop me from drinking Pimm's in the Southwark Cathedral courtyard on Saturday, all be it in tights and jacket. (not just tights and jacket)

My first few weeks as part time teacher, part time all the other stuff have been hectic busy land, but today I have a little breathing space. 

Me and June were up all hours writing a proposal for the StoryHands Collective, (you know, I blogged about it here) which may have caused me to be a slightly less than awesome teacher after 4 hours sleep, and is not something I want to do every week. But you know, it felt really good to be exhausted from doing work on something that I really care about. Not that I don't care about the kids. *backpeddles*

But you know what I mean. busy = good. And June is very good at the graphic design stuff.

In facebook project news I have completed the Gs. Gee, what a G-Star I am. 

Greg

Glenn

I also got all up in the London Fashion Week that is S/S 2013, well, in that I did some writing and drawing.

The writing you can read here if you feel so inclined, it is mostly me being intoxicated by colour and amused by pretentious fashion silliness. 

like these comedy fashionistas I sketched in the Somerset House Courtyard

here are some S/S 13 actual fashion illos I did for Amelia's Magazine (who else?) 

Holly Fulton (what's better than blue roses?)

Jean Pierre Braganza

 Dans La Vie

And finally for your viewing pleasure, here are some huskies in party hats I drew. I entered them in the

 Ohh Deer cushion competition, but I'm pretty sure I did not win.

Horay!