Thank you - embroidered notes

These are from earlier in the year but just realised we haven't shown them here before. We have a new group show coming up where we've developed a technique of fractured patterns and brush stroke textures that we've played around with in these embroidered sketches. We usually have a heap of tangled orphaned threads after each embroidery project. Which we collect into empty jars to use later for little embroidered sketches/doodles and experiments. These are a couple of thank you embroideries we created using some of these left over threads. Little notes to say thank you to some kind hearted people that have supported us along the way.

Material Edge at Wangaratta Art Gallery

We're very proud to be part of an exhibition on now at the Wangaratta Art Gallery (Vic, Australia) that has been curated by the wonderful Sally Huguenin. Sally has brought together artists/designers working in contemporary textiles across varying fields such as the visual arts, fashion and graphic design.

 "The exhibition includes work as diverse as Douglas McManus’ laser-engraved textiles with 3d printing; Kathy Temin’s renowned synthetic fur landscapes; and an interactive pompom installation space by Australia’s queen of craft, Pip Lincolne. There will also be four incredibly intricate outfits by Sydney fashion designers Romance Was Born, including a dress famously worn by Cate Blanchett that is on loan from the Powerhouse Museum; knitted self-portraits and photographic imagery by Melbourne-based contemporary artist Kate Just; and colourfully embroidered advertising and typography by twin sisters and graphic designers, Maricor/Maricar."

 The exhibition runs until the 19th October. More details can be found on the gallery website and the flyer is below.

The work we have on display is primarily our commercial work - showing how embroidery is being used by clients in publishing and advertising. We also included some of our personal textile pieces that were created after our time in London ("Maps" wallhangings) as well as two new pieces created specifically for Material Edge. "Don't Worry Baby" hand embroidered lettering and a new patchwork wall hanging, "Neue Folk".

Unexpected Collaborations: Sweetfighter process

Earlier this week I posted up about the video campaign we worked on for the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre. As briefs go this was a treasure to work on. The campaign centres around the theme developed by The Monkeys, of 'Unexpected Collaborations', as the centre fosters collaborations across deliberately diverse fields to encourage progressive research and teaching. With this theme in mind we brainstormed ideas using a visual play on the subject matter that would allow us to tell these stories in an engaging but informative way. The concept for Sweet Fighter (diabetes experts working with gaming programmers) was to focus on the theme of balance as it relates to diabetes and the constant need to keep blood sugar levels in check sometimes with the aid of insulin. Balance also tied in well with the other half of the collaboration - gaming - as there's often a sense of using physics and balancing interactions in gameplay.

The end product (view video here) is a series of carefully balanced sets/still lives incorporating fruit, vegetables, sugar and medical paraphernalia. We wanted to continue on the theme of unique insights coming from unexpected collaborations by also including a visual play at the end of the video that would hopefully surprise the viewer and have them question what they were viewing. With this video the mirrored reflection reveals itself to be a whole different world - another nod to gameplay and virtual realities.

We thought it would be nice to share the process behind making these videos as we always enjoy seeing the behind the scenes of other animations and the steps in getting to the final product. Also we had a lot of fun with this project so it's nice to have a record of how it went! For this post i'll focus on Sweetfighter and follow up with Robocrop.

Below are some of the very first storyboard frames created for the pitch. Early on in the pitch process we decided that a mixture of stop motion and live action would be the best way to handle the production as timings were tight. I think in all we had 3 weeks for pre production and shoot (3 days) so a full stop motion production would have been impossible.

It was important that we use as many found 'ordinary' objects as possible but have them behave in unconventional ways e.g. the glowing mechanised plants, bouncing ice creams. Not just thinking laterally but behaving laterally too so to speak. So it wasn't going to be a case of fabricating our props from materials like paper/clay etc like we had done in the past. Initially we thought this would make pre-production simpler. As long as we could source the objects we were fine. But after thinking through the sets (3 alone for the Sweetfighter) we realised how wrong we were. We were going to be dealing with a lot of fresh fruit that needed to be attached together without spilling their guts onto the set, make semi-solid jelly that could be used structurally and figure out how to make ice-cream that wouldn't melt on set and could be manipulated for stop motion.

Luckily the internet taught us how to make fake ice-cream (frosting and a lot of icing sugar) and we had access to Barnes nearby and found jellywax. What turned out to be the trickiest set to make was the first scene and the fruit molecule. We had about three goes creating the sculpture, the first to test the technique of connecting the parts, the second on set for the pre-production shoot to test the rotating base and then on the actual day we had to make it again from scratch. Timing was important so we had a lot of back up fruit raided from the all the supermarkets and green grocers in my neighbourhood plus Paddy's markets. After a near meltdown at one point when I couldn't find a perfectly round and green melon I went upstairs to the supermarket and found the mother lode of perfectly sized round melons. We came home with about 5 and used 0 in the end.

The rigging for the props was one major hurdle especially with the fruit. We thought gluing might work which shows what complete DIY non handypeople we are, but luckily had skewers on hand to spike them together. With clever rigging designed by Mel Pragassen for the spinning hoop (disco ball) and turntable we were able to make the first scene live action.

The next two set ups were a mix of stop motion plates comped together and a bit of live action to capture the exploding balls. With a lot of elements made to look like they are floating in the air rigging turned out to be a bit of a headache! Charlie, Sam and Maricor did a great job on the rig removal. The shaky behind the scenes video of the spinning molecule above and the photo below shows how much had to be cleaned up for the finished video.

So that's how we made Sweetfighter, next up will be Robocrop!

Etsy update

Hello! We've just updated our etsy store with some of our original hand embroideries, new giclee prints and embroidered totes and pincushions. There's a mix bunch of lettering pieces as well as the epic battles we created for Pick Me Up London waiting for a lovely new home. Below are some of the new pieces available.

New year freak out

Hello! New year and new blog post. I remember when I was younger the time between the end of the year and the start of the next felt a lot longer with enough time for me to get used to the idea that a new year was about to begin and be comfortable with the new starts that it would bring. Now it feels like I only have a few days to celebrate the end of the year and all things that have happened before the freak out of realising that holy moly what will I do, the new year is here and it's time to start all over again. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only person who sometimes feels overwhelmed at the possibilities of a blank page, the feeling I get at this time of year is like that just about a thousand times stronger.

At the end of last year I started to worry about how we could develop our work. My boyfriend will be the first to tell you that one of my favourite past times is to worry so I didn't turn away from these thoughts. Instead I thought about why I was feeling that way. I think it's healthy to reflect and analyse what you're doing, explore change and develop so that's what we'll be doing, starting now.

This year has the potential to be a lot of things, whether we're ready for it or not. So maybe, just like the first beach swim of the season, we just need to jump in!

1. Christmas is a lot more exciting when children are involved. I was never really into the whole Christmas build up - decorations, trees and lights until this year. I went a little decorating mad making pop pom and streamer garlands, painting ornaments, a wreath and also pimping dollar store bon bon crackers with new gifts, confetti and jokes. This is the finished wreath. I used left over acrylic paint so unfortunately it wasn't water proof and had to be taken down whenever the rains came. Next time i'll make some with waterproof paint!

2. I was in a budget saving mode this year so also hand painted some wrapping paper. 

3. We had a mixture of old ornaments for our first tree borrowed from M's parents and my own. We did splurge a little though on three owls that we hid amongst the pine needles.

4. For family Christmas lunch we continued M's family's tradition of paper hats and added some fun variations from TMod, masks too!

5. Bon bon aftermath. I replaced the novelty gifts with some amazing Japanese wooden spinning tops from Poketo, mini 3D wooden puzzles and some woven bangles from Leif that I was almost tempted to keep for myself.

7 - 10 We've been spending a lot of time at our favourite beach. Ava's slowly getting used to the open water, she loves digging her hands through the sand. Hopefully she'll take after M's side of the family and be a natural swimmer.

Painting with thread + painting with paint

Hi it's been a while... again :( I've got to get back on track with blogging but once I missed one week then two weeks and so on it became harder to write this post. Too much to cover and I hate excessively wordy posts! So maybe if I write a list of things that we've been seeing, reading and doing Maricor and I can get back to things in more detail over the next few weeks.

Paint studies for HeyMun
We created a series of custom embroideries for our amazingly talented friend HeyMun and her new EP. HeyMun contacted us earlier this year asking if we'd be interested in working with her on her album artwork with a brief that went along the lines of do whatever inspires you. Naturally we said hell yeah and this is what we created. We were inspired by the folksy, colourful and bright sound of the track By Sea which you can listen to here.

Freelancing mothers
I wasn't sure how much baby stuff to write about on this blog since it is really meant to be about MaricorMaricar and the work that we do but I really want to share these blog posts from A Cup of Jo since they've helped me cope over the last few months of hectic work and family life. Juggling work and Ava has been pretty difficult so far, hence the very long stretches between blog posts this year so I've been almost obsessively reading blogs by other freelancing mothers to figure out how they do it. These ladies have shared their experiences and after reading their stories I feel a little better knowing that it's a juggling act that other people, not just me, struggle with and that there are ways to make it work. The first half of the posts are by mothers who work fulltime in offices, the second half are freelancing mothers who work from home. My good friend forwarded me these posts, thanks CC! -

TOMS shoes launch Sydney & Melbourne
Last week Maricor and I had a short but sweet trip to Mebourne for TOMS shoes. We painted a couple of murals for their Sydney and Melbourne launches as well as some customised shoes. We're really excited about how the murals turned out since we hardly work at that large a scale. We'll post again about the project in more detail with some pics. Thanks again to the team at TOMS for getting us on board. If you don't know about their One for One movement I highly recommend you read about it on their site. If you buy a pair of shoes they give a pair to a child in need and if you buy a pair of sunglasses they help restore sight through clinics, prescription glasses or medication. Earlier this year Maricor travelled with them on one of their many Giving trips. They travelled to Peru and Guatemala visiting schools, clinics and orphanages but more about that trip later!

We also recently talked to The Design Files and our old alma mater, you can read a bit more about our process and background here and here.  And lastly Maricor and I will be talking at the Sydney instalment of Field Trip presented by our lovely agents at Jacky Winter and the folks at Australian Infront. The conference is different to the usual format with the presenters also going through their creative process live on stage. We'll be showing some embroidery on stage, since we only have about 45min we'll have to do a little 'here's one we prepared earlier' cooking type magic. Tickets are on sale here

Some things that have happened, will happen and are happening right now

Hello! I'm not sure what it is about July/August but we've just come into a bit of a busy period with a few projects and exhibitions on. It's an exciting time and wonderful to have the security of knowing we have another job lined up beyond the current one but I wish we were able to spread these out a bit! Especially as i'm taking some maternity leave I feel a bit guilty at relying on Maricor to hold the fort.

Unfortunately we are a little late posting about the Tweet a Brief exhibition organised by Handsome Frank, our agents in the UK. As the title suggests the show asked people to tweet illustration briefs for their illustrators to create the artworks.

We chose this brief from @ejikeanyanwu 'A balloon full of multiple colours of paint, burst by a bullet, spilling onto a blank canvas. Represents creativity.' We've explored water colour gradients in our work before but have wanted to experiment more with thick paint textures and splatters so had a lot of fun with this brief. Below is our response to the brief and if you follow this link Handsome Frank have posted up the exhibition in it's entirety on their blog.

Maricor posted earlier about the True Self exhibition co presented by our Australian agents Jacky Winter and MGPO. We had a lot of fun collaborating on our two boards - the first with Limedrop and the second with Thom Kerr, and to be in an amazing group show with other talented folk such as Matt Huynh, Beci Orpin and We Buy Your Kids. The entire show is up online which is great since we also missed out on seeing it down in Melbourne.

We also had the chance to be a part of a group show down at He Made She Made gallery in Sydney which opened last night. 'Who Shot the Serif' focuses on type on and off the page and brought together another group of designers that got us excited, WBYK, Luke Lucas, Thi Nguyen, Wing Lau plus a whole lot more. Our original Go Play, Kylie type and B&E are on display, the show will run for 5 weeks. You might see us down there, I have to go back and have a closer look at the work, the opening was pretty chockers and I could't get close enough to the works to take in the details!

And to round off what's become a monster of a post is another group show we'll be part of in Melbourne at Brunswick Street Gallery. Needle Work Needle Play will showcase contemporary Australian artists and illustrators who have used embroidery in their work. We are very excited to be part of this show and can't wait to see what the other artists have created. Carly who invited us to take part has done an amazing job organising the show and has even created a blog to document the lead up to the show and has profiled each of the artists. Some of the artists have shown some sneak peaks of work in progress, it's all looking great, here is Cat Rabbit's blog post on her piece. Another shame that we won't be down in Melbourne to check it out!

As Prescribed - Fine Lines

As Prescribed is an artist driven t-shirt label that aims to be a platform for exposing artists and designers to the universe. Founded by Melbourne based illustrator Eveline Tarunadjaja and designer Nick Parker, As Prescribed takes on the form of an art gallery, in an online retail environment.  The awesome folks behind new T-shirt label As Prescribed invited MaricorMaricar to take part in their first artist series "Fine Lines". The series of shirts also feature designs by Eveline Tarunadjaja, Sean Morris and Kubota Fumikazu.

The label launched last week with a pop up shop and exhibition at No Vacancy gallery in Melbourne. Head down and say hello to Eveline, she's super nice and until the 20th of May visitors to the gallery get $10 off shirts.

Our piece is titled "The Hungry Slug" and this little monster and some of his gang are currently on display in the exhibition as well as a couple of original hand sewn embroideries and our print "Makers, Dreamers" which is available for sale during the exhibition.

Each artist has a nice little interview up on the As Prescribed site, here's our one, we were pretty nervous on camera and kept pulling faces!

MaricorMaricar joins Jacky Winter

We're playing catch up on our blog so apologies for some not so 'new' news. Last month we were incredibly stoked to join the talented stable of artists represented by the illustration agency Jacky Winter. We're so happy to have local representation by such an awesome agency and we look forward to working with them on some super projects. Coming up is a group show presented by Jacky Winter and MGPO titled "True Self". It's a collaborative group show, each artwork on display will be a collaboration between two artists. The creative process is sort of a chain letter: Each artist starts off one piece before mailing it to another artist to complete, so MaricorMaricar will have our hands on two pieces in the show.

More information on the exhibition is available here. The exhibition will be on display at Melbourne's GPO and will be on show between June 1 - 24. All artworks will be for sale ($200) and all proceeds go to the charity Fitted for Work - a not-for-profit initiative, providing clothing and training to help disadvantaged women find employment. Below are some sneak peeks of one of the pieces we're collaborating on.

Some exciting news...

Hello! I've finished my latest little project. It's a knitted pompom beanie that i've fit in whilst waiting for feedback from clients or fabric to dry (and when I needed a break from embroidery!). The reason for the beanie is my boyfriend and I are going to have a baby. Wowser! We're actually almost 7 months along and i've wanted to share the news here for a while but things were a bit hectic with the move back from London, my sister's wedding and just general new years and Christmas stuff.

Maricor and I are going to see how things go once the baby arrives. BUT MaricorMaricar is definitely going to get bigger and better this year! We have a few exciting projects under our belt that we can't wait to share and a couple of commissions pencilled in. We're also going to venture into customised short run textiles. Still only in very early planning and dreaming phase but this is the year we're going to make it happen. I'm so excited, this year is going to be crazay :)

1. I based the beanie on this pattern I found online. I made a few adjustments to it to make it a bit larger and added the pompom.

Land Of Nod

One of our favourite pieces from last year was the embroidered winter catalogue cover we created for the Land of Nod. We tried something a little different with the treatment for the embroidery and also a new type of fabric. We had a great time sourcing new types of cottons and linens to embroider with and we were very excited when the client requested a denim like linen twill from the swatches we emailed through. It was a real treat to embroider on and really contrasted well with the colours in the design.

Below are a few process images that we can finally share but for the final cover head over to The Land of Nod's blog (there are a couple bonus images there too including the selection of fabric swatches we collected for the piece).

Pages from my sketch book - ideas for the type treatment

Digital colour rough - this is the step where we set the colour palette and this file becomes our colour reference when we begin sewing

We mix the colours in as we sew, for this piece I had anywhere between 2 to 4 colours going at the one time

...and the completed embroidery!

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and New Years!

This year has been a crazy adventure with a lot to be thankful for, luckily the downs were brief and the highs were high! We hope this year has been amazing for you as well and that 2012 is bigger and better! Thanks so much for reading our blog!!