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!

Diamonds on the Soles of Their Feet

aka the Mushies.
First bunch of illustrations from the new series we're working on together. To paraphrase Paul Simon, they had diamonds on the soles of their feet. The fae folk danced 'til dawn and left these behind.

More to come, maybe some in colour!

/ca

A new animation

We've got a new animation in the works, it's a stop motion one with miniature sets. We're experimenting with a few techniques with lighting and lenses and we've done all the animation in camera. This piece is a joint collaboration with co-director Michael Blanche and our super talented friend Becky Freeman aka Sui Zhen is providing original music.

We're just putting the finishing touches on it so in the meantime here are some progress shots. The process has been interesting and to describe it as hectic would be a huge understatement! The turnaround for the whole project has been 2 and a half weeks but we're all chuffed with the results.

co/

Murder By Death "White Noise"

Here is the finished animation for Murder By Death's "White Noise", the band were awesome to work with! We had fun with some stop motion in this video but the majority of it was created in After Effects using hand drawn graphics, built props, bleached chicken bones and bits and pieces we scavenged from our garden and our clothes.

Murder By Death - "White Noise" from MaricorMaricar on Vimeo.

Smiling Flash

New pics of my latest drawing. This was actually based on an old drawing I had done back in my uni days.  I was hell bent on clearing up some space and was sorting out old work to chuck out. I came across this drawing (the old piece of cardboard on the lower left of the photo) and I thought I could do something with the girl in the striped top. I had to discard my first attempt, I wasn't happy with how I had dropped in the pattern behind her and I also wanted to make it a full figure drawing. I've included it in here just for kicks, I actually dont mind the pattern so much now...

The text is taken from a Broken Social Scene song "Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl"

Biennale Of Sydney

The 17th Biennale Of Sydney opened last week and I was able to spend an afternoon at the MCA taking in some art. It was a lot to squeeze in a few hours so I'll definitely return for another visit as well as check out the other venues (I'm looking forward to taking a trip out to Cockatoo Island and seeing Cai Guo-Qiang's installation).

One artist that stood out to me was Fred Tomaselli, the first time I had seen his work was actually on the cover of The Magnetic Fields' "I" album. Up close and in person his work is so amazingly detailed and vivid.  His technique of suspending elements in resin makes it a hypnotic experience when you stand in front of his large scale paintings.

Detail from the cover of The Magnetic Fields' "I" album.
Gravity in Four Directions, by Fred Tomaselli. 

WIP - "White Noise" music video

We've almost finished our latest project, an animated music video for Murder by Death's track "White Noise". The band have been awesome to work with, they came up with the idea for the video and asked us if we would like to work with them after they saw our animation "Say Hello to the Ground".

These are some style frames for the animation and I've also posted some photos from the mini stop motion shoot we did. Thanks Michael for building us an amazing animation stand!

/ca

Miniatures

Did some quick-ish miniature lace patterns, one for a birthday card for my boyfriend. I think it looks better reversed out of black. (On a side note we went to Pendolino's for dinner, their veal ragu is amazing. I can't stop thinking about it and am trying to think of good reasons why we need to have another special dinner soon.)

/ca