Drawn in the lounge near the heater (winter is definitely here), 9pm on Monday 21st June 2010.

She reminds me… I must see the Tim Burton exhibition soon. Anyone been?

]]> http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/06/mondoodle-21-06-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/05/attacked-vanquished/ http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/05/attacked-vanquished/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 10:54:27 +0000 elise http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/?p=1591 This is the All-Clear. If anyone visited this journal today and got a fright because you ended up somewhere bizarre (a short trip to virus land I suspect)… yes we were hacked. I sincerely hope that nothing went awry on your computers.

Thank-you to Lulu for spotting it! To Damon for passing it on and to Peter… mountains of gratefulness for fixing it. I’m reinstating all the sidebar info and hopefully nothing was lost. They’re getting sneaky! Now back to business…

If you haven’t come across them before, Avant Cards are a brilliant company that distribute free postcards throughout Australian cities. Businesses can invest in advertising through this system, but they also feature artists work from time to time – so you never know what you’re going to find. The postcards will go into cafes and shops.

So now I have to decide which of two images to use! Here are a few layouts. I’d be grateful for feedback here! Please let me know which you’d be most likely to pick up as a free postcard, and which would make you most likely to go to the exhibition or at least look at a link on the back.

And next??

I get to focus! There’s painting for my exhibition at the end of May, working on my novel at uni and working on the epic graphic novel The Protector. For me – that’s a new experience. Long term projects only and no scattering my head in a thousand different directions each week. How strange.

]]> http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/02/behind-me-before-me/feed/ 4 http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/02/the-drawing-two-step/ http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/2010/02/the-drawing-two-step/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:10:18 +0000 elise http://www.elisehurst.com/journal/?p=1310 I was talking to someone outside the gym the other day and she said it must be hard to work from home. Not really, I said.

True and not true. Today I find myself working but succumbing to my usual problem. No matter what I am working on I always seem to want to work on something else. Does anyone else have this issue?

And of course I couldn’t sit there without drawing in the dim light with music all around me…

Playing: Steve Sedergreen – piano, Mal Sedergreen – saxophones,
Nick Haywood – bass (sorry Nick – my view was blocked), Ted Vining – drums.

It’s close enough to a Monday drawing. And besides I have a cold and am relegated to a couch in a slight stupor.

Paris Cat on Saturday January 23 and finished on the couch Monday evening, January 25, 2010.

So to summarise some 2009 things…

The online shop was brilliant – hordes of visitors and all in all a nice smooth system. Let me know any feedback please! Thanks for all the support and thanks to Peter for making it all run so brilliantly.

The exhibition dates were set for May 2010. It makes a huge difference to have an opening night to work toward now.

On an activist note, the campaign to stop the canning of the Parallel Importation restrictions was a success, thank goodness. There was a lot of weird press that went around last year relating to all of this. When this arises again, I can only hope that all of us will be involved in the process to come up with a good strategy and some clear aims this time – politicians, creators, publishers, book sellers, agents and societies, all. For now, with the digital book about to become a major player and change the book landscape in the next 5 years anyway, we have bigger fish to fry! How do we keep publishing alive, keep printing the glossy stuff we love, satisfy the need for low-price digital books and make sure that the people creating this stuff can still afford to do so? It’s going to be very interesting.

These arrived in December – the second glorious book in the Moorehawke trilogy by Celine Kiernan. And, joy of joys, the covers match up as they should! They’re also starting to get some attention, the first one being voted one of the top 5 covers of the year on this great blog. Yay! So here’s book one, and 2 of book two… because you could line up book two over and over for a long forest, if ever you should need one…

There was also gingerbread. Much much gingerbread, made by Peter and iced by me (mainly) for all our friends and family with kids. Sorry to those of you without kids. No gingerbread for you. And then as an antidote to all the cheerful houses we made, here are the gingerbread ZOMBIES. The trick is to make good use of the change-over time when the white icing is combining with the red icing in the icing syringe… it looks just like intestines.

And I have greened the studio a little with a yukka and random tubes of bamboo.

We are all getting along just fine.

You may have seen me working on this one at recent markets. Well, in the last week I’ve moved it and the cafe rabbit down to the living room to finish them off (too hot upstairs!) and here he is. I’m still making slight adjustments to the chair and background tones… but otherwise he’s about done. I’m really happy with the colours and his presence in the picture.

Happily he’s going to make his card debut soon too. We’re making a few of my recent paintings into cards which should be around in the next month I hope. I can’t wait to see how they turn out. With this picture, although I did try out different designs that placed him in a fully developed scene (like a library or study), in the end I really wanted this to be a portrait, where he is the only focus and all other details (especially colours) are designed to help show him off to best effect. I’ve created a spotlighting effect too by darkening the edges to further concentrate our focus.

So I’ll be sure to post if there’s something fun coming up.

And if there is something you would particularly like to take part in, please let me know.

Resplendis
By Suzanne J. Willis

He slipped, shadowy, through the cobbled streets, the world around him a dull grey. One end of the string was tied about his wrist; the other around the abdomen of an enormous dragonfly. Its wings beat with a soft buzz – not the mechanical sound of the clockwork insects that filled the city, messengers and spies for the wealthy. His dragonfly was real.

He hastened. The dragonfly’s wings refracted the light, the colours vivid in the gloom. The clockworks, with their cogs and brass, could never replicate this. He had to get it back to her before anyone noticed. An old man with downturned mouth and too-smooth skin passed him, trailing a clockwork on copper wire and giving him a strange look as the dragonfly failed to whirr and click the greeting clockworks gave one another.

He thought of her again. She would be sleeping as the pale light crept across their apartment. She refused to ever shut the blinds. She had never said anything about the clockworks, either. But he saw something in her when she looked at them, that went unnoticed by everyone else. It was longing and sorrow and pity. He knew she tried to hide it.

Stars had pinned the darkness through the window last night. Silently he crept out and rode his rusting bicycle out of the city to the borderlands that were forbidden to ordinary men like him. There, the grey of the cobbles and slate gave way to the golden she-oaks that were home to the giant dragonflies.

Furtively, he took half a fat pomegranate from his pocket, scattering its seeds across the ground like ruby-hued rain. With a soft, plucking noise, the dragonfly crept down the trunk and began to munch softly on each seed. When it reached him, it gnawed at the fleshy pulp of the fruit as he gently tied the string around it.
Now, as dawn began to bleach the sky, it followed him through the city streets and lanes, the scent of the second half of the fruit luring it.

He leaned the bike against the wall and crept through the gate and up the stairs. As he entered the apartment she stirred, sat up, white sheets tangled around her body. He untied the string and watched as the dragonfly settled at her feet.

She smiled at her lover: the one who understood every part of her and would risk the borderlands for her happiness. Then she stretched and flared her own delicate wings, emerald and cobalt against the ruby light of the rising sun.