Yen interview

This month's Yen has just come out and has an interview that co and I did with Yen's editor Annie Sebel. We met her at Black Star pastries for some yummy sweets and coffee and had a chat about just winning the British Council's Realise Your Dream Award, how we work together, the occasional screaming matches that come with being sisters and how our high school art teacher introduced us to Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics and led us on our path to becoming designers.

We're still very shy so we had a quick 90s dance off before hand to calm our nerves. But we needn't have worried, Annie was super nice and friendly!

Sole Cola

Our latest collaboration with the guys at GEA Interactive is live. MaricorMaricar designed the digital home for Sole Cola, the vivid artwork of the multi talented Roderick Smith.
"Sole Cola is an exploration of found objects, vintage papers and mixed media - a fascination with combinations of colour, form, texture, patterns of positive and negative shapes, areas of counterpoint, visual minutiae and textual stories subconsciously expressed". Roderick is a regular renaissance man, an artist and musician, he is one part of the band Firekites.

ABD Risographs & Sewn Pieces

The risographs we printed for ABD6 show are now available for sale on our site. Here are photos of the prints and the details for each are below. Also the remaining sewn pieces from the show are available to purchase from our site.

Los Muchachos Bestial - "Leche Derramada"
202mm x 275 mm
Risograph on light weight matte paper
Open Edition, signed
Will be mailed flat, padded.
$27 unframed (inc postage within Australia)
International buyers please email us.

Los Muchachos Bestial - "Enredado"
202mm x 275 mm
Risograph on light weight matte paper
Open Edition, signed
Will be mailed flat, padded.
$27 unframed (inc postage within Australia)
International buyers please email us.

"Diamonds On The Soles Of Their Feet
297mm x 420 mm
Risograph on light weight matte paper
Open Edition, signed
Will be mailed rolled.
$42 unframed (inc postage within Australia)
International buyers please email us.

Pinching Ourselves

The last couple of months have been pretty awesome for ca and me when we thought it couldn't get even huger, BAM, something comes up which makes us pinch ourselves and wonder if its all for real. The nominees we're announced for Plus Camerimage 2010 and in the music category sitting amongst the big names Lady Gaga, Gorillaz, Fever Ray, Florence And The Machine, Eminem and UNKLE et al is our clip for Murder By Death.

Plus Camerimage is an international festival dedicated to cinematography and our animated clip for Murder By Death's "White Noise" has been nominated in the music video category and to say we're chuffed is a huge understatement! We're excited just to be amongst great directors and to have our work seen by the jury.

Other things that have happened this week include; meeting one of our creative heroes, Deanne Cheuk, missing out on a SOYA award but huge congratulations to the winners and all the finalists, taking part in the I Can Draw You A Picture: Re-Building lab at LiveWorks, getting an ass-whooping in Scrabble, taking down our group exhibition ABD6 and parting with some favourites and enjoying a day in the sun at the Newtown Festival.

Capture the Fade Photography Exhibition opens at the Paper Mill Gallery this Wednesday and guest judge Bill Henson will announce the overall winner of the competition. Congratulations to our friend Gene whose work will be exhibited and good luck for the anouncement!!

One last thing for this Monday's post, ca and I have started work on our next series of type and thread pieces, below is a sneak peek. Oh and since ABD6 has finished up, the unsold pieces will be put up for sale soon on our site, we'll keep you posted.

/co

Upon A Fold

Ca and I were so excited to see one of our pieces on the awesome site Upon A Fold's blog. If you don't already know about it, its one of the best blogs on the internet all about paper, "a little peek into the world of paper artistry". Forgot to say their shop is full of paper goodness too!

"Don't wake me I plan on sleeping in"

I had an early day today, I woke up at 3am to watch Formula 1 with Michael. I used to watch it as kid and remember it being really looong and only watching the beginning and end but now I've started to really get into it again since Michael follows it pretty religiously. It's funny it doesn't seem to take forever like I remember.

This week co and I have started our new series of musically inspired embroidered type. We're having fun with watercolours designing the type and figuring out colour schemes before getting into the embroidery. Co finally cracked open the watercolour set she bought at Tokyu Hands when we visited Japan last november. Meanwhile I'm still using pencils and have a feeling i'll be switching over soon, i'm jealous of the colours she's getting. These are the threads I picked out for my next canvas, a lot of aqua greens and purples.

Also i'm very excited that my mini orchid is finally sprouting some new life. I got it last November and I was worried it was slowly dying because nothing was happening. But now it looks like there are 2 new shoots coming out of the old flower stem.

Gemini

Spent part of last week making repairs on the siamese twins we made for our 'Triangle Circle Square' animation. I'm not sure if i'm just excessively messy but I always manage to attract dust and fibre particles and have a horrible time keeping the white clay clean. Because we sort of rushed that animation some of the details we're a bit dodge, since I had some time on my hands I remade the arms and one of the legs. All that's left to do is patch the limbs onto the body and make a new collar since the other one got banged up a bit.

It was fun making the twins, they're actually based on an old illustration series co and I did based on sideshow freak zodiacs. We hope to make some more miniatures inspired by the awesome Ultraman toy monsters we got in Japan but we're still in thread and paper mode so it might be a while 'til we get around to them.

Paper + Type + Ramen

I've had "Keep On Moving, Tokyo Japan Nov '09" pinned to my inspiration board ever since our trip to Japan last year but hadn't got round to doing anything with it till now. I started out sketching some type treatments for another sewn piece based on this line, but along the way its switched from being sewn into something made out of paper.
The words are just a reminder for me to keep creating and making things. Tokyo is such a vibrant place, there's a constant flow of movement and there's so much stuff to soak in. I came back really inspired and this poster is just a quiet reminder to keep creating.

Tough Titties

We met Lou and Alex from Boccalatte at the Realise Your Dream awards night and they told us about their new blog toughtitties.com.au that is a showcase for creative females. I think it's an awesome idea, and hope word spreads. At UTS our course was probably 80% female if not more but once we started working professionally the female presence seemed significantly lower. I've always wondered why. Sorry I ramble.. please do check out their blog and recommend a tough titty!

PS co and I also have an interview up.

Nit-tweets

http://twitter.com/maricormaricar

We'll still be blogging though!

Matt Huynh "Alluvia" Ehxibition

Another good show to check out if you're in Sydney is Matt Huynh's  "Alluvia" exhibition at the Paper Mill Gallery, opening on November 3.

'Alluvia' refers to the earth washed down a body of flowing water, sometimes resulting in the formation of a fan at the base of deep slopes. When this collected earth has been found at the base of Martian craters, they are indicative of water’s presence and suggestive of proof of life.

This kaleidoscopic illustration collection reflects upon the enduring fragments of the universal in the personal that harmonise towards a holistic and romantic relationship with our future.

The show descriptor above is intriguing, looking forward to the show!

/ca

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