Mustard Greens

These are my latest favourite thing.. with a real mustardy kick to them, they make any salad into a refreshingly spicy taste sensation, and complement starchy winter vegetables perfectly. I love them with roasted winter vegies (pumpkin, turnip, parsnip and carrot), tossed with chickpeas and some tahini dressing.. mmmm :) They will definitely be featuring in the winter months of next year's calendar. People need to know!

Sweets for you, sweets for me!

Early this month I was priveleged to be invited to the opening of Sweets Workshop, an exciting new venture in Summer Hill.



They are filling a real niche in the area, offering a retail art gallery exhibiting and stocking art, decorative objects and giftware produced by local and international designers and artists. So you can come in to be inspired by artwork, find some cool and unusual things for a gift or for yourself or even approach them about exhibiting or stocking your own work.



It's very exciting indeed to see some beautiful creative people fulfilling their vision and I wish them all the best!
They are still in the process of stocking their shelves at present, but will be open to the public very soon. In the meantime check out their blog for updates.
http://www.sweetsworkshop.com/

Life drawing

I went to Life Drawing at the Arthouse Hotel in Sydney, and I must say I was impressed! Expecting it to be a bit of a casual affair, with people treating the life drawing as a novelty or afterthought, I was pleased to find the atmosphere almost formal, and the crowd very focussed and attentive to the life models. I guess it's hard to find cheap life drawing in Sydney, so when it's available the artists flock around. It was the first life drawing I had done in quite a while, but found my contour drawing skills were lying not too far below the surface, especially when excavated with a glass of shiraz.
The beautiful structured interior of the Arthouse was the perfect surrounds for this activity, and very inspiring. I'm hoping to go back on a semi-regular basis.. it was a fabulous creative start to the week! Here are some of my scratchings..

south african flowers

A friend of mine wanted some South African flower illustrations to decorate her wedding invitations so i was delighted to have the chance to create some for her. Their flowers are robust and colourful, and very satisfying to draw. We chose the following as they were important to her and worked well together as a border.


Her wedding theme was beach/indiginous/hippy.. I did my best to satisfy these criteria! Here's the final product: