Turns Of Speech & Figures Of Phrase

Here are the sewn pieces we created for ABD6...a few we've already posted about but there are a couple of new faces. "Get All Up In My Goat" was a drawn illustration I posted about earlier but we decided to extend "Turns Of Speech & Figures Of Phrase" into an embroidered series. Besides Hungry Colours and "Gotta Keep Cheering" we also have "Tongue Tied Hopeless", "Epic Battle"and  Sweater Letters "A", "O" and "J". These are for sale during the exhibition.
There's a great bunch of artists and designers exhibiting as part of the show. We got a sneak peak at some of the pieces when we dropped off our stuff this morning, beaded geo pendants, knitted fast food sculptures, embroidered tote bags, and risographs! I think the site is still under construction, Naomi has been run off her feet organising the show (huge thanks!! You're awesome Naomi, I can't believe this is the 6th year for ABD) but as soon as we get more info on the site we'll post it up here so you can check out the other peeps.

Rizzeria

Ca and I checked out an awesome printing collective in Sydney called Rizzeria this week. We were looking for a printer to make some posters of our black and white illustrations for the group show ABD6 (which opens tomorrow at Kinokuniya books in the city). And can I just say the prints look frak'in good, I was a bit worried that the fine lines so close together would look like a mess but the details held up real good. How can I describe riso prints??? It's in between screen printing and photocopying if that makes any sense... We are planning on doing a whole lot more experimenting with risographs, illustrations and posters which take advantage of the process, I can't wait to start!

SOYA 2010

Great bit of news for Ca and I, we've made it to the finals for the SOYA awards! Whooop! Wow, we would really love it if we won it, the mentorship with Deanne would be amazing for us. Trying to start off on your own (or together in our case) is really tough and this year has been exciting but also a really steep learning curve for us. So any advice or tips or yeah just chatting with Deanne about how she's navigated her career would be awesome. I think we've mentioned before that she's been one of our creative heroes, she's achieved a lot as an illustrator, designer, art director, publisher and more.

As part of SOYA 21010 there's a new People's Choice award, you get to vote for your favourite finalist and have a chance of winning a trip for 2 to Sydney for the Awards night ceremony. The finalist voted the People's Choice walks away with $2000 in flights. Check out the finalist gallery and please help us out with some votes, voting closes midnight November 1. Cheers!!

Bingle Car Insurance

The paper project we mentioned a few weeks ago has gone live so we can finally share more details about the job - a series of stop motion Bingle car insurance tvcs created by Scott Pickett from the Jungle Boys. Co and I created the 2d paper elements working with the super talented Benja Harney who created the 3d paper sculptures. My favourites are Benja's car, co's driver and customer rep scene and the Sales Department building. It was heaps of fun coming up with the different characters. The most nerve wracking part was drawing on top of Benja's lovely creations, we didn't want to screw them up!

Here's one of the five animations, and some production shots from the shoot.

Art By Design Exhibition

So at the moment we're sewing day and night. This long weekend we were hoping for some nice weather so we could take our sewing outside and enjoy some time away from our little "studio" but its been pretty miserable the last couple of days. Oh well, at least we've got the daylight magnifying lamp to help our weary eyes at night. The reason for all this sewing is that Ca and I will be showing work in the upcoming Art by Design 6 group show at the Kinokuniya gallery. The details are below, if you're around drop by, we'll be putting some of our sewn work up for sale during the exhibition. We're pretty torn about which ones to keep but all sales are going towards our UK trip next year. Which means we're going to part with some of our favourites. We're also planning to sell some posters of the illustrations we've done this year. It's opening on the 17th of October and runs till the 13th of November, hope to see you there.

Embroidered Tote Bags

We popped by Icarus store during the week and had a browse through the new stock Nathan just received from Opening Ceremony and Band of Outsiders. Nice stuff! Ca and I ended up leaving with two new OC embroidered tote bags. We're suckers for patterns and embroidery and these are pretty awesome.

Almost beach time!

The weather has turned and i'm pretty confident I can pack away my winter leggings! I'm really looking forward to summer and having friends over for dinner parties and cult movie nights.

We finished the paper props we were working on last week. Hopefully the TVC will go live soon so we can show you what we've been up to. It was a really fun project and to top it off we got to work with Benja Harney of Paperform. We had blogged about his work after seeing the Pop Up Alphabet Co Op show at Object Gallery so we were really excited to work with him. We hope we weren't too fangirl!

Oh and we probably should have posted about this before it happened but the UTS: Sydney International Animation Festival ran over the weekend and the embroidered Architecture in Helsinki video screened as part onedotzero's Craftwork program. We also entered a short animation into the MAKE IT competition run by the CIIC.

And the last bit of news is that Co and I have been shortlisted for SOYA in the Visual Communications category. We're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll make it to the finals as we are huge fans of Deanne Cheuk who will be the mentor. Her mix of art direction, typography and illustration has been a huge influence for us, so to be able to meet and get some much needed advice would be awesome.

Phew that was a long post...

Did we mention we like paper?

Co and I have been busy working on a couple of exciting projects for the last week. One is a stop motion TVC that we're helping make paper props and illustrations for. We're almost done and are definitely looking forward to the weekend and Jingle Jangle and celebrating Realise your Dream!

Realise Your Dream

It's been pretty crazy for Ca and I lately which is why we're a day late with this week's post. First off we got the news that one of our illustrations has been included in the year's Curvy book. Which is being guest curated by Fafi and Colette Paris founder Sarah Lerfel and art directed by Deanne Cheuk. We're pretty chuffed!
In another bit of awesome news we received the British Council's Realise Your Dream award last week. So Ca and I are going to be making our way to the UK next year!! Exciting stuff!

Also it looks like we're going to be non-stop for the next month or so as we've also confirmed we're going to be taking part in the annual Art By Design group show at the Kinokuniya galleries. At the moment we're planning on creating more embroidered pieces as well as exhibiting some of our recent black and white illustrations.

You Gotta Keep Cheering III

Co has just finished her latest and (I think) final version of You Gotta Keep Cheering. She's tried out pen, then paper cut out, for this one she's used needle and thread.

Here's a detail of it, the full version can be seen on our site.

Over the weekend we visited the The Pop Up Alphabet Co Op exhibition at the Object Gallery, curated by Sarah King. With typographic works from artists and designers like Benja Harney and AFOM it's the sort of show Maricor and I would love to be part of.. maybe one day! One of my favourites was Sarah Maxey's poster and card designs.

/ca

I want to go to there

I went and lined up for macarons at Adriano Zumbo's cafe on the weekend. Thankfully the line wasn't as crazy as I heard it could be, we waited only 15min or so. Being my first visit, I was curious but open-minded and I'm pleased to say they were pretty good! My favourite was the passionfruit chocolate version. I'm looking forward to the cherry and coconut one I saved for today's afternoon tea.

We tried to go to rozelle markets afterwards but the stalls were packing up by the time we walked down. I miss poking around markets and garage sales and finding random knick knacks. The little miniature of Paris was one of my finds on a particular good garage sale saturday. I managed to go to two and found bargains at both.

I love the little details in the street scene. At the moment it's hanging up on my inspiration board. It's good motivation to keep working! The glass jars holding our new embroidery thread are from the second garage sale. We went to Morris and Son's in the city and went nuts buying thread. They were from a discontinued line so we though we better stock up in case we can't find them elsewhere.

/ca

Epic Battle

We've gone a bit thread mad lately and are both working on some more sewn artworks. My table is pretty messy at the moment. I dream about finding one of those really nice old wooden drawers to keep all my little bits and pieces.

We went rummaging through our materials last week and came across some old projects we started for the Poketo project. In the end we went for something else (I think we were worried that the stitching wouldn't look right on the wallets) but we want to finish these and hang them up somewhere. Get some colour in our house other than the lemony yellow that is EVERYWHERE.

We're going to call the gnome and dragon piece 'Epic Battle' :)

/ca

Designer Disco

Over the weekend Ca and I were part of the Designer Disco lane way exhibition for Sydney Design Festival. We forgot to bring a camera on the night to take pics of the light-boxes, dang, but here is the poster sans the light. Its called "Something Close To Nothing (but different to the day before)". The theme for the exhibition was music, so we took that line and played around with the idea of making nothing out of something....the solid space of the poster is made up of thousands of lines built up to create a flat texture...at least that was the idea. We hope the lyric isn't too obscure, can you guess which song its from? I hope we didn't give the impression we think music means nothing!

Thanks to Australian INfront and Future Classic for hosting the Designer Disco event.

Hungry Colours

Just finished our latest typographic experiment this time using needle and thread. A few weeks ago I posted this design as a watercolour and ta-da now it's sewn :) It's based on The Unicorns' song 'Ready to Die'. But I've only just realised that I've been singing the song wrong all this time! He's saying cougars not colours but I think I prefer it this way. You can see full design up on our site.

/ca

Neil Gaiman at Graphic

Over the weekend the Graphic festival took over the Sydney Opera House, we were pretty excited to see Neil Gaiman in the flesh and hear him read his short story "The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains". Although I was disappointed not to be able to get Neil to sign my copies of Sandman we came within inches of the man himself at the opening night drinks. We were a bit awestruck at how many of our creative heroes were at the event! Next time we're gonna have to pluck up the courage to introduce ourselves. It was a great festival with some informative workshops and hopefully Graphic 2011 will be just as awesome.

Gotta Keep Cheering

True to our word, here's another Monday post....
Second stab at "You Gotta Keep Cheering, this time I've approached it with a scalpel blade and dusted off an old set square for some "precision" cut out triangles. I'm happier with this design, a lot more brighter than the first attempt and it was good to break away from drawing for a bit. I've got a callous on my finger, I suspect the A2 page worth of lines for "Something Close To Nothing" had something to do with it. Maybe I could whip up a thimble especially for drawing (or perhaps just cutting up an old glove might do the trick) for next time. Or, I guess I could learn to hold a pen the right way...

In the meantime we're exorcising our obsession with minute lines and patterns and have created some geometric based illustrations for posters, perhaps a t-shirt and for fun. Here's a process snap of the one of the designs.

Away from the desk we've had some fun at Jingle Jangle a "monthly night of Rock N Roll, Exotica, Soul, Rhythm N Blues, Beat, Rockabilly and 50s and 60s Pop" at the newly re-opened Good God Small Club. We checked it out for the first time and we'll definitely try to make it a regular thing. The music was great and the dancing was fun.

Back Soon

Co and I have made a pact, we're determined to blog more regularly. At least once a week to be exact. Blogging more, means working more so we have things for show and tell. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how we go! Oh and hopefully it'll also help us improve our writing and conversational skills :)

Mondays seem like a good time for blogging. We'll have hopefully been inspired by weekend outings and been refreshed by lazy sleep-ins. This weekend I was good and got out of bed not too late, I spent a day at the Biennale on Cockatoo Island and also watched Inception. Both were pretty awesome. I don't want to spoil Inception by over-hyping it so that it can't help but fail to meet expectations, but I gotta say it was pretty darn good. I was lost in the story for the whole 2 hours and a bit. I love when movies do that. Make you forget about everything else except for what is happening right now and worrying about what's about to happen next.

The Biennale was an almost-didn't-happen. I almost didn't see a couple of artworks that in the end were some of my favourites. Just after leaving the ferry, I bumped into my friend Dara who works at the Biennale and luckily she pointed us towards a few works that we hadn't planned on checking out because we were in a rush. Amongst them was Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves. His work was moving and beautiful and to think I wasn't going to see it..

This has turned into a pretty long post. Yikes. So work, I do have some new type experiments to share. I've brought out the watercolour pencils and tried to work in colour for a change. I'm going to keep at it and try a few coloured patterns that i'll hopefully have done for next time. The other one is a sign I made for the newly opened Icarus Store. It stocks menswear (poo I cant fit anything) from the likes of Patrik Ervell, Loden Dager and Commune de Paris. The stylish interiors were designed by Lenny Wong, an exciting young designer from Sydney. Co and I are taking turns working at Icarus Store on Fridays but i'll be there tomorrow. Also a few doors down is shelf/life. I'm keen to have a proper look at their homewares and craft on a day i'm not working.

/ca

New type work

We're busy on some new type work and patterns, here are some bits and pieces. We're working on a new series called "Phrases of Speech" all based on twisted idioms and turns of phrase that Ca and I are guilty of dropping into conversations now and then. "Get All Up In My Goat" is a classic example of me getting my phrases mixed up. It's a mash up of "All up in my grill" and "Gets my goat" and was the inspiration for this series.

"You gotta keep cheering" is sort of like our motto. I scribbled the line down in my notebook a few years back after hearing it chanted at a BSS gig in Sydney. It might seem a bit egotistical (it was Keven Drew chanting it out to the crowd) but it was really the opposite. On the night he was feeding off the energy of the crowd, who were really into the gig, and feeding it back into the show. And not wanting it to stop, anyway, I thought it was a cool motto. Still undecided about the type treatment, kind of needs to have more energy or be more loud to suit the sentiment. Will keep at it and post up what we end with.

Sydney Design: Designer Disco

Co and I are just about finished creating our lightbox design for Designer Disco. "Australian INfront is extremely excited about bringing the Designer Disco to life with the record label Future Classic. This offshoot of Future Classic’s insanely popular underground clubnight Adult Disco burns the disco flame until late, late, late. Meanwhile, in the laneway behind the venue, an exhibition of lightbox artworks illuminate and enlighten. The array of cutting-edge Sydney designers involved include Alter, Future Classic, Greedy Hen, Leif Podhajsky, Like Minded Studio, Miricro/Maricar, Sensory,
Sopp Collective, String Theory, Toko and We Buy Your Kids."

10pm till late, Saturday 14 August
The Civic Hotel & laneway, 388 Pitt Street
Cost: $15

There's a typo in our name (we're Miricro/Maricar) nevertheless we're excited to take part along side these awesome designers. Here are some process shots of our design.

/ca

Album Artwork

A new batch of Global Village albums is live and in stores. This time round we visit South Africa, France and explore African Blues. As always it was an enjoyable mix of hand drawn illustrations, patterns and textiles. Also we have another album artwork design for Universal Music, for the compilation Songs For Sweater Weather. For this one we rummaged through our closets for the comfiest looking knits and broke out the thread and needle for some sewn type. Credits for the stripey sweater on the cover goes to our housemate Karen. This colourful sweater was bought on her recent trip to South America! Me and ca are pretty excited about all the great textiles, patterns and traditional handicrafts from there so it's on our list of destinations we have to visit.

Global Village designs created for Mathematics.

Typography misc I

We'll be updating our website soon with more typography work but in the meantime these are some type experiments from our time at Mathematics for pitches that didn't go ahead.

Oxygon RD2

Part 2 is done and up online, view and vote for it here:
http://play.sydneyoperahouse.com/index.php/graphic/810.html

Please help us get to the last round and vote for our video! Voting ends Wednesday 14 July 9am (AEST). We've also posted a video diary of some behind the scenes footage, a little about the inspiration behind the animation and some bloopers that didn't make the final cut. Click here to view the diary.

Graphic Festival: Meet the Mythmakers of the Modern World is a 2 day festival of performances, talks and workshops celebrating "comic books, illustration, animation, music, multimedia and other new ways of telling stories". Check out the program for a full list of events.

Oxygon Animation

MaricorMaricar and our friends Michael Blanche and Sam Hoh have made it to the second round of Graphic Festival's animation competition with out animation "Oxygon". Oxygon is the story of two lost cosmonauts and their misadventures in space. Thanks for all the support for our clip, you can watch the first instalment here.
We're working hard on part 2 of the series, its another 20 sec animatic continuing on from the last animation. As part of this next round we need to get a Facebook group up and running and get as much people behind the project, so please help us and join our group. Here is the link for the profile, we'll be posting up a video diary and process work as well as some random bits of inspiration along the way.

'Blerg' IdN magazine 100th issue + Australian Edge interview

The stop motion animation we directed with Michael Blanche is finally finished! We didn't want to jinx it in case it wasn't finished in time for the deadline but now we can say what it's for. We'll post the final animation when the issue comes out.

Also co and I have an interview up at AustralianEdge. Thanks Clayton and Duncan!