31 October 2015

This month on emuse

Recently I've been doing a lot of drawing and painting:
And I showed you an old painting project, the Mount Fuji mural on my shed!
I've been making shrink plastic ginkgo earrings (which was kind of a drawing/painting project too!)

And taking a lot of self-portraits!

And I showed you some photos from an arty walk in the park, some recently thrifted items. and my zine collection! And told you about starting to go to Rock Choir.

30 October 2015

This month I have been mostly...


Going:
To Tuscany and the Italian Riviera! So I hope to show you some of my photos next month! Meanwhile, here I am looking very chic and continental, and attempting (and failing) to do pouty serious looks!

Reading:
I've been reading some books related to the area I went on holiday, and I'll tell you a bit about them in a few weeks.

Singing:
Don't Stop Me Now, and Hold My Hand, at Rock Choir!

Watching/listening:
I've been catching up on some of the items from the BBC's Make It Digital season. My TiVo was looking very geeky for a while with all the programmes about Ada Lovelace (my new hero!), algorithms, coding, Bletchley Park, etc, as well as the other things I'd recorded such as a Horizon episode about creativity, a documentary about Escher (whose work I'd recently seen an exhibition of), and a documentary about cosmonauts that I'd seen before but wanted to watch again as it was so good.


I also watched a very moving documentary, Seven Songs for a Long Life, which is well worth a watch if you can see it. I didn't really mean to watch it, as I thought that a film about the residents and staff of a hospice might be a bit depressing, but I just happened to have the TV on and was drawn in by the beautiful singing and the wonderful people. It was actually quite uplifting!

27 October 2015

Rock Choir!

I didn't really mean to join Rock Choir. It just sort of happened! It's quite expensive, so I just planned to go along to the free taster session last month as a fun evening out. But I enjoyed it so much that I decided to join.

The choir leader directed me towards the soprano section when I said that I usually tend to sing the high notes. I ended up sitting next to a very chic lady who I was sure I recognised. After quizzing her a bit about where she had worked in the past, I discovered that I was right - she had been one of the assistant heads in my primary school when I was there! She knew who I was when I mentioned my mum, who worked there too. I discovered at the end of the evening that there were a couple of other people I knew there, too, including someone who had worked beside me at the high school when I first started.

For the first three weeks we were learning Don't Stop Me Now by Queen, which is a song I've always really loved and loved singing along to. After the second session there were downloads of the song on the website, which meant that I could practice in my own time, and this really helped. It's easy to forget your notes over the course of a week, but practicing on my own meant that I did remember most of them. And it's easy to do while carrying out other tasks, like doing the dishes or ironing.
We then moved on to learning Hold My Hand by Jess Glynne. I didn't know this song very well, but still enjoyed learning it. Each week we also sing a song that the choir has learned in a previous term, and the new members just have to pick it up as it goes along - but the downloads of these are also on the website so I have practiced a few of my favourites!

On the first evening I didn't know that it would be a good idea to take along a bottle of water, so if you are going I would highly recommend this. I've actually just bought myself a couple of funky new water bottles from Asda, a pink one and a teal one. There is a little bit of dancing about as well as singing, so you can get quite thirsty. It's also a good idea to have a pen or pencil, a highlighter pen, and a folder or wallet to put your lyrics in.
I love the feeling of being part of a choir, especially when the different parts and harmonies start coming together. There's a real feeling of accomplishment. But it's also a great laugh when things go wrong. The choir leader is really bubbly and enthusiastic, and always gives us positive encouragement.

I've also been reading a book about creativity, which says that doing things unrelated to your creative pursuit, like singing in a choir, can help to boost your creativity. This is a theory I've had for year myself anyway, that you need to "feed" your creativity by doing fun activities.

25 October 2015

Sunday self-portraits: Photo booth

When I was in Edinburgh to get my hair cut last month, I noticed a photo booth in Urban Outfitters and thought it would be fun to take some photos there after I'd got my hair cut. It was fun, and now I'm thinking of turning it into an annual tradition!

22 October 2015

Mount Fuji mural

My friend Marceline recently asked whether I'd ever blogged about my Mount Fuji mural. I answered that I was sure it would be back in my blog archives somewhere - then I had a look myself and realised that I had painted my mural almost a year before starting the blog! And I didn't join Flickr until the year after that, so it wasn't there either! At least I had the good sense to paint the date on the mural, so I could actually remember when it was painted!
In 2006, I had been living in my house for about 8 years. The wall at one end of the brick shed had been painted white by the previous owners of the house, and I found it really annoying to have to re-paint it every couple of years when it started looking grubby. So I came up with the bold idea to paint a mural, which I hoped would not look so obviously dirty after a couple of years. I had thought that it would maybe last for 5 years, but 9 years later it is still looking amazing, with only a few areas that need touched up.
Here's a before picture of the wall - nice but plain.

Unfortunately there are no step-by-step photos of my mural - at the time I had no idea that I might want these sometime in the future for an un-dreamed-of blog! But the great thing is that I do still have the inital sketches and one of the inspiration pictures.

Here's one of my initial ideas. I knew that I wanted to have Mount Fuji, so I did this little watercolour as a first idea.
I wasn't entirely happy with the watercolour, so I searched online for woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. I found this one by Hokusai, called The Inume Pass in Kai Province, which was just what I was looking for.
I did a small pencil sketch, taking my favourite part of the image and modifying it to fit the shape of the wall.
After giving the wall a fresh coat of white exterior masonry paint, I was ready to start. I think I drew the outline in pencil first, before starting to paint. As well as the white masonry paint, I used normal acrylic paints. Some of these I mixed with the white paint, and some I used straight out of the pot/tube. Some of the paints were Golden brand, but others were just cheap basic acrylic paints. There doesn't seem to be any difference in how the different paints have aged.
Just finished!

I have various acer trees in pots in the little seating area beside the mural, and I love how they look with the mural.
When I had my porch replaced last year, I had plain glass put in rather than the privacy glass that was there before, and was very moved when I realised that I could properly see my garden and mural from inside the porch!
Also last year, I painted the door and window frame a lovely teal colour, which ties in well with the mural, and this year I had the old corrugated asbestos roof (which leaked badly) removed and replaced, and I painted round the trim with the teal colour.
The mural makes a wonderful background for many of the self-portraits that I take in the garden. And it was also a fantastic setting for my Totoro snowmen!
I hope you've liked hearing about my mural. It was really fun revisiting an old project like this, and while looking for the drawings I found an abandoned comic drawing project that I hope to pick up again now, which will be interesting. I hope this post will give you the courage to try painting a mural of your own - it's one of the best home improvement projects I have ever done!

19 October 2015

Recently thrifted


Here are some really fun items I've bought secondhand recently!

Isn't this dress-up doll amazing! I found it in my local charity shop. It's so retro and stylish! I think I may have had one of these at one time. It got the ladies who work in the shop reminiscing about how they loved to play with dress-up dolls. I'm now contemplating making my own outfits for this doll!



The Miffy bag in the top picture was found on my only trip to the car boot sale with my parents this year (poor weather had kept us away). I also bought a Miffy bowl, which had come from Japan.

This teeny Shaker box is lovely, and the wood is so smooth and silky! I bought it at the same time as the vintage Heathergems brooch, again at my local charity shop, and the purchase came to a grand total of £1!

And there have been some amazing clothing buys too (including a whole outfit for £2!), but these will, I'm sure, make it into some future self-portraits!

18 October 2015

Sunday self-portraits: God Help the Girl

I love the movie God Help the Girl, and I watched it on the morning of the day I was going to get my hair cut. My haircut turned out to be a few inches shorter than I'd intended, but then I realised it was very much like the character Eve's hair in God Help the Girl, which made me a bit happier, as I find her incredibly stylish! I'd also just bought a bright coral lipstick, which helped to complete the look.

Here's a collage of photos from the film, to show the look I was going for!






And here's my mum doing a bit of dressing up at about the age I am now - can you see the resemblance!

16 October 2015

Coloured doodles

Here's what I did with the doodles I showed you earlier this week. I filled them in with watercolour paints. But I've also scanned in the originals, so I can print them out to use with coloured pencils too!


14 October 2015

My collections: Zines

I thought it would be fun to show you my zine collection. I only started collecting zines in recent years. Above are some of the more random zines in my collection! I love that the story of my zine collecting is also connected to many of the friendships I've made in recent years. Read on to find out more!

Although I did have a couple of hand-produced booklets on wholefoods from back in the 1980s, I think the real beginning of my zine collection was when I did some Illustration summer school courses at Edinburgh College of Art. Part of each course involved making your own little zine, and we made extras and swapped them among each other. Here are the zines from the first course, with those by two of my Japanese friends, Miki and Maki, at the top, two by me at the bottom right, and the one with the shadowy lettering is by my friend Marie-Noelle. It's fascinating to see the different ideas we all came up with from an initial brief of "My Kind of Day".
I especially love this one by Maki, about a day in the life of a speck of dust!
I'm really pleased to still be in touch with these friends from my first time at summer school, and I met up with Miki and Maki when I visited Japan, as well as another friend from art college, Kaori. And Sayoko is another friend from that first time at art college.

After that, I happened to be at a craft fair at a library in Glasgow where Marceline was selling some of her zines about Japan, and this was an important moment in starting me zine collecting, because I realised that I could find zines on my favourite subjects. Then Marceline held a zine-making workshop, which I attended with my friend Aurora. Here are some zines I have by Marceline:
Aurora and I became friends after meeting on Flickr - I loved the little cartoons of Edinburgh life she drew, and commented on them, and soon after that we met for tea! We share a love of Japan. And when I went to my second Illustration summer school we were in class together. These are some zines by Aurora:

 Most of my zine collection is zines about Japan! Here they are:

 




And these are two tiny zines about Japan I made at Marceline's zine-making workshop. I didn't ever publish them, but I did publish a handful of copies of a larger zine about Japan.

I also have some of Andrea Joseph's zines. I have followed her work for many years since first coming across her on Flickr.
I buy most of my zines from Etsy. I love all the fun little things that come along with the zines I buy, and I keep them all in an envelope.

And here's how I store my zine collection (not very exciting, I'm afraid!). 
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