Oh, For a Bit of Snow!

Life's a bit hot at the moment. I received an email from a friend in Ireland with a photo of their house totally covered in snow. Oh how I wish I was back home instead of this Australian summer! Of course everyone at home is wishing they were here, but still.

Our computer is in our living room which is west facing and gets a real bashing from the sun all afternoon, heating the room up like a greenhouse. That's my excuse for not posting on here lately.

The above sketch was drawn at Wye River. I had gone for a little walk and sat down by the river. This little bird entertained me for about half an hour. He was so skillful at catching flies, he mesmerised me. When I got back home and to my bird book I found him to be a Flycatcher (makes sense really) aka a Jacky Winter (doesn't make quite so much sense.) I'd like to make an etching of him in the future.

To finish with I'll show some photos of our lovely, but warm, living room in our new house.


That's it on the top floor. It's a great house, a bit shabby and full of noisy possums, but I love it. It's just a shame the lease is only for 9 months because it is due to be demolished in September. All the best places get pulled down, it's so sad.

At the Beach

I've spent the last few days down the Great Ocean Road with Jeremy's family, caravaning at Wye River. It's so lovely to be by the beach and have constant bird drawing material at hand! Here area couple of pages from my sketchbook.

And a couple of photos of my playings on the beach

Thirty Minutes

Yesterday I made a new book. It's called "Thirty Minutes in St. James' Park, London" and contains a collection of drawings of (mostly) birds I drew while in St. James' Park, London, last September. I am editioning it out of 50 and they are photocopied on my scanner printer machine from pen and ink drawings and then hand bound.


I have been wanting to make a range of small artist books and zines for a while now. My first one in this range is called "Seagulls Outside State Library" and I was selling it at my market stall before Christmas. I want to sell them on etsy, but I'm not sure which shop to put them in, or maybe I should open a new shop, but three shops might be a bit much! I'm going on holiday tomorrow, to the beach, so hopefully I'll be able to work it all out by the time I get back!

The Currawongs

Ok, so, I charged up my camera battery and put it in, ready to take photos for new years eve and... my camera has finally died. I think it must be all the dropping of it. I've never been very good at holding on to it! So I went into town yesterday and simply had to buy a new one. So I'm all ready now and here we go...

My larger recent work.

I remember first hearing currawongs when I lived in Abbotsford. They actually say "currawong currawong." I think they are lovely looking birds, about the size of a crow but a little bit sleeker. Apparently they are a little bit evil and rather clever.

My original drawings of the currawongs were done with black ink and a brush (see above) and I wanted to recreate this effect in etching by using sugarlift. This process involves painting your image onto the plate with a sugar solution. You let it dry and then paint diluted bitumen over the top and let that dry. Then put the plate into warm water and the areas where the sugar solution was painted lifts off, exposing the copper plate below. An aquatint is then applied by dusting the plate (still with the bitumen covering the areas where the sugar solution was not lifted) with fine rosin grains and melting them with a flame. Aquatint creates texture on the surface of the plate so it picks up more ink and creates an even dark tone. Then place the plate into the acid for the desired length of time. When the plate is ready take it out of the acid, clean off the bitumen and melted aquatint grains and you are ready to ink up and print.

Finally

Finally, after 36 hours labour my sister in law gave birth to a son. My brother phoned me late last night and I could hear him in the background! I'm an auntie!

Finally, I have found my camera charger. I found it in a broken bag behind our clothes rack while I was looking for wool to make a blanket for my new nephew!

Finally, I have my new press up and running. I just need to get to know it a bit better before I can start on the real stuff, there are a few things I need to iron out first.

And finally, I'm getting these images loaded up onto etsy and my blog. Here's the Crested Pigeon.

Exciting News

A few more hiccups before I'm truly back at my blog! I had a few weeks where I thought this computer had died, but it seems to be working again without me doing anything to it! Another hindrance is I can't locate my camera recharger, so I've having to scan everything in and I have a very substandard scanner!

I have decided to finally upload images of some of my scholarship etchings that I did while at Australian Print Workshop the past year. These are the etchings included in my recent exhibition at APW which finished on the 20th December. I have now added these two below to my 'bridgetfarmerprints' etsy shop.
So, what is my exciting news? Well, I have two pieces of news. As I type, my sister in law is in labour with the first baby of our immediate family. They are in Belfast and I am in Melbourne, so I've been kept up to date by my brother with texts. I'm sending them lots of good thoughts!

My other news is that I've bitten the bullet and finally, actually bought myself a printing press. So I'll be printing away whenever I want now. I can't wait to get it all set up and working. I'd take a photo of it to show, but as I said, I can't find my camera battery charger and it would be a bit too difficult to scan!

I'm Back!

Hooray, we have Internet in our home! No more trips to the library or sneaky posts while at work. I've so much catching up to do because I've been making lots of things since I had so much more time due to not being able to work on the computer!

OK, I'll start today with the new bird prints I've been making.

I was very busy last week because I wanted to get some new gocco prints out for all the markets I'm doing in the run up to Christmas. You can find me as usual at Rose Street Artist's Market every Saturday and at the Abbotsford Convent Makers Market for the next few Sundays. Also I'm doing Northcote Twilight Market at Northcote Town Hall Thursday nights 6 till 10. This is a lovely little market and I just love the cycle up that great big hill every Thursday!


So, here are the new gocco prints, this is a New Holland Honeyeater. I often get asked if I have any prints of this bird and now I do!

And these two little birds are Australian Robins. I thought since robins are Christmassy back home in the UK, I'd try a few Australian ones. The top one is an Eastern Yellow Robin and the bottom one is a Flame Robin.
And of course, no prizes for this one, a Laughing Kookaburra. I heard one from our living room in our new house earlier this week. They sound fantastic!

To read more about how these gocco prints are made see my tutorial blog post on the subject.

We Have a Winner!

It's been a while since my last post, this is due to not having internet available. After moving out of our previous place I've been living with my boyfriend's friends in their living room for the first two weeks which was an experience. One good thing about it was that their cat was adament that it was going to sleep on our sofa bed and Jeremy's allergies subsided slightly, so there is hope yet of owning a lovely cat one day in the future!

All this while I've been battling it out with very small children in libraries for the use of computers. It gets a bit upsetting when you are there to look through realestate.com.au for a place to live and you have to wait for a crowd of children to stop playing computer games. But maybe my annoyance was just because of my stress levels and desparation to sleep in a normal bed.

Now we have found a lovely lovely house, I think it's the best place in Melbourne! Unfortuneatly it's going to be demolished in 9 months, but we're going to make the most of it in that time. We still have no internet but that is on it's way. Also we need to work out why the shower only has two temperatures - scalding hot or freezing cold, as well as why we can't get electricity in the studio room. But it's coming together nicely.

But the main reason I'm posting is because we have a winner for the November blog giveaway! The winner is Feed The Dog who has had a run of bad luck lately so I hope this will cheer her up. She chose "Circle Blue" as her favourite and it will be flying its way to her in time for Christmas.

For some reason on this computer I can neither add images nor spell check, so my appologies for such a dull looking, badly spelt post. Hopefully soon I will be back in order and able to post from home.

100

This is my 100th post on my blog and it coincides beautifully with what I am going to post about!

Since May until September this year I have been working on illustrations for a poetry book called '100 Australian Poems You Need To Know" for Hardie Grant Publishers. The book has poems from all through Australia's history and I really enjoyed reading them all when starting out the project because I knew very little Australian poetry to start with.


Yesterday, in the post, I finally received my copy of the book and it is lovely, a really beautiful object even before you've even opened it! Well designed, well put together, great poems and as for the illustrations, well, for me it was quite strange to see all my drawings and etchings in there, but very satisfying.

The book will be available from 1st December, I'm not sure where from yet, I'm trying to find out myself because most of my family will be getting a copy for Christmas!

I've found a review for the book here and info about it on readings website here and I've found a site where you can pre-order a copy here .

Tomorrow we move out of our house, but unfortunately, due to things out of our control (because real estate agents are supposedly in control, but not doing a very good job) we have nowhere to move into. Homeless! So if you see Jeremy and I walking the streets in the next few weeks please invite us in for a drink and a friendly chat, thanks!

Don't forget to enter my blog give away competition!

Bridget's November Giveaway!

I should be cleaning and scrubbing and packing up our flat, we are moving this weekend (as long as the real estate agents get back to us to let us know if we have our new house, we're cutting it fine here!)

My kitchen is chaotic with half filled boxes everywhere and dirty dishes.The bathroom is clean from waist height up but I haven't quite got down to the bath and sink etc. and our living room is chockablock with cardboard boxes, so much so that I can't get to the skirting boards to scrub or the floor to vacuum.

So I decided to have a rest and I came up with a giveaway idea!

You could win the Featherstitch Fantail, 100% natural wool, 100% hand embroidered brooch of your choice! All you have to do is let me know which your favourite design is on the Featherstitch Fantail website by leaving a comment on your chosen brooch. I will pick the winner at random at the start of December and then make the brooch and send it to the winner.

Good luck!