I’m excited to say that we have just finished an intense four days shooting the remaining food shots for Sarogini’s upcoming Sri Lanka cook book. It meant Sarogini preparing, us styling, and Craig shooting over 25 different dishes in four days; no mean feat for the dynamic Sri Lankan lady who never seems to tire. She was a trooper…

And thus began the production line of delectable Sri Lankan curries, from the fragrant kitchen adjoining Craig’s fab studio in downtown North Perth, to the studio set up and then to our plates! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much and can now honestly brag that I can handle a curry pretty much as hot as the Sri Lankans can … (maybe not as much as this).

The wrap of this shoot means that we are one (major) step closer to helping Sarogini achieve her dream of producing a cook book that celebrates the fabulousness of Sri Lankan food with her particular twist – her recipes are designed for the novice cook and honed to perfection after years of running classes from her kitchen.

It’s been a long journey and one that’s been a learning experience from day one… except perhaps for Craig who is responsible for photographing an impressive range of best-selling cook books over recent years and so we are really fortunate to have him on board, helping to add magic to Sarogini’s book and teaching us heaps along the way. Like how important a pair of tweezers is to food styling…

So now it’s back to the design drawing board for me; choosing the best of Craig’s images from our Sri Lankan trip, tweaking the colour palate, designing patterns (absolutely positively NOT work!), finalising the layout before passing it on (gratefully) to the editors. And the lucky people who get to test the recipes!

And all the while I fed my instagram obsession by snapping our table arrangements; not necessarily after styling was complete but you get the drift…

 

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to work with a local children’s clothing designer, putting together some patterns for fabric and embroidery. Fun, it was… and a challenge to put together a repeating pattern design that could also have elements that can be taken and used on other pieces of clothing. But pictures are better than words, so I’ll show you some:

The sorry state of the retail sector here in the West, (and no doubt elsewhere), has led to my major client, Community Newspaper Group, to cease publishing ishoperth as from last week’s issue. It’s a shame for many reasons that I don’t really need to go into here, except to say that it was a fun product to work on and, more importantly, had lots of potential so I’m sorry to see it go without having been allowed to keep on blossoming.
I’ve loved magazines since I was old enough to be allowed to read Dolly (and I can still remember Cleo‘s first male centerfold but I was, of course, too young to be allowed to souvenir that one for posterity) and have made much of my career around designing them. Ishop had a great, passionate and hard working team behind its creation and it’s a big shame that we weren’t allowed to give it our all but, such is the current economic climes and the big boys were simply not willing to give it the time and resources needed to see us through the bad times.
So just to say bye bye, here’s some examples of ishop that deserve to stay out there. (click for larger view).

Just so I can feel like web surfing is actually a useful occupation, here’s something I just discovered. “Wood Marbelling”. Just gorgeous, don’t you think? I would like to cover a chair with that pattern.

http://g-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com

I have always loved patterns and have spent quite some time attempting to create patterns and, more often, admiring (with some degree of envy) those of others. I have in my cupboard quite a collection of fabrics collected over the years with the good intention of making something significant from them that would celebrate their gorgeous patterns and colours but my dressmaking skills have dictated that they stay comfortably in the cupboard. Perhaps I will drag a few out in the near future (and indeed that was one of my many unspoken new year’s resolutions).

Recently I’ve had reason to explore the exotic world of Islamic patterning, something that has always fascinated me and oh what a plethora of glorious information can be found simply by asking Mr. Google to spread them out in all their gloriousness! It is truly amazing to study the geometrical intricacies of these patterns and realize that many have been around since ancient times and were created with nothing other than a compass and some mathematics.

Thank God for Illustrator… I’ve been having a bit of a play with some patterns, thinking in terms of both positive and negative space so that were they to be created in metal, they could work in two layers, thus creating an interesting moiré effect.

Here’s two I’ve been working on:

 

It’s fun to do these … and I’ll be doing lots more. It’s been great to be forced to think in two (or is it three) dimensions, and to be able to explore the negative as well as positive spaces. I’m going to try to translate these to some fabric designs too so watch this space.

I’m fortunate to be sitting here in my little cottage just out of Yallingup where I’m spending a week recharging the batteries in anticipation of a creative and prosperous 2012. It’s a beautiful spot…

This is Injidup beach, just down the road (a bit) from the Wyabup cottages where we are staying. It was totally desserted yesterday when I took this pic with my trusty iphone 4 and I’ve yet to have a swim there but I look forward to lots of walks there in the upcoming week.

Unsurprisingly, I always get a bit reflective at new year; things haven’t gone as well as I’d have liked these past 5 years and time seems to be racing by at an alarming pace so now, as usual, I am thinking of how I can possibly make 2012 a better year all round. Making resolutions and plans that are within reach is important, but also making these goals something that requires a bit of spleen is good, so my first resolution will be to run a marathon. Sitting at the table here after a lovely lunch of fresh ham and sourdough bread, I feel that this is immensely achievable but when I set out on my next run, I know I shall be painfully aware of what a challenge that will be. Thanks to my fabulous personal trainer, I am confident that this will happen. Maybe not in Paris, as I had originally planned, but somewhere!

My next one is to spend some more time with this blog, cataloguing my work and hoping to get my message out there to prospective clients in order to attract some more interesting projects. Although I continue to work on ishoperth magazine (I can’t seem to lose my love of magazine design), I am looking forward to some different and interesting creative challenges, starting with the fruit of my Sri Lankan trip, Sarogini’s cookbook, which I hope to start in the following weeks from now, and an immensely challenging project that I’m going to be doing with a local architecture firm which will require me to think outside my normal range, tackle some new dimensions and different materials.

Exciting!

But first things first… champagne for tonight, good friends and family, and this amazingly beautiful corner of the world where the beaches rival any I’ve been to and which I doubt will ever be surpassed.

Happy New Year!

 

This needs no words. But I’ll give you some, anyway… I found this on the cool hunter (thanks CH). I’ve been feeling a bit flat lately and this made me smile. I need to set one up right by my desk for times when my muse is failing me and things are looking a little bleak. With Christmas zooming up like a giant gaping money sucking vortex, I need my muse back.

Anyone who knows where to find one of these, you know where to find me.

OK, so this has nothing to do with design, but a lot to do with quality of life and since my quality of life directly influences the quality of my design, then I thought I’d share this with you.
Emma is a friend who was at my sister’s birthday dinner the other night, which we were fortunate to celebrate at Cantina restaurant, in Mount Lawley Perth.
BYO meant we could indulge in their degustation menu which was a joy to indulge in. Especially the dessert … check out some reviews here if you are interested.
It was here that Emma, who as a result has revealed herself to be a woman of great foresight, told us of her “F” theory… which is basically the idea that if one is not feeling particularly happy, then one should add a few more “F” words into their day. The only flaw I can see in this is that adding more curse words into your day doesn’t necessarily increase happiness, unless you enjoy being grumpy. So what she really means are words like “friends”, “flowers”, “fun”, “frolicking”, “freedom” “finishing” (that last one is mine… since I never really finish anything then I feel particularly chuffed if I actually do… I’m sure Emma will approve). I didn’t realize there were so many good “F” words to be indulged in in one’s endless pursuit of happiness and well being.
So today’s “F” word was “friend”… I had coffee with my friend Norm, because it was a work-at-home day and the beauty of work-at-home days is that I can do what I want.
Please feel free to give me any more good “F” words, or bad ones if you like. Balance is as important in life as it is in design.

I recently had the pleasure of travelling to Sri Lanka on a photography trip for a cook book that I am to design for the wonderful Sarogini Kamalanathan. Sarogini unearths the secrets of Sri Lankan cooking to students from her kitchen in Perth, Western Australia, and had harboured the desire to create her own cook book for many years. My colleagues, writer Norman Burns (http://thewritestuffmedia.com/), and photographer Craig Kinder (http://f22photography.com/) decided to help her achieve her dream and so set off on an 8-day road trip from Negombo, just north of Colombo on the West coast, through to the tea plantations of Nuwara Elya in the up country and down to the divine fishing village of Galle in the south, then back along the coast to Colombo. With the culture of food as our theme, we photographed fishermen, fresh produce markets, chefs in kitchens, street vendors and food stalls, tea pluckers and countless gorgeous feasts that were cooked for us. Apart from the sightly unnerving experience of driving up winding roads on the edges of mountains, sharing restricted space with manic bus drivers and suicidal tuk tuks under less than ideal road and weather conditions, the trip went swimmingly well, and we found the country to be beautiful, surprising, exotic, and the people charming and friendly. And the food…!

We will soon begin the lengthy process of sifting through thousands of Craig’s beautiful images and I will attempt to do them (and Sarogini’s recipes) justice by creating a really beautiful book that celebrates the fantastic food and culture of Sri Lanka.

I was mostly taken by the colours and textures of Sri Lanka and took quite a few snaps myself. Once I’d found out how to purchase an SD Memory card but that’s another story… here’s a few that really just show the things that caught my eye…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making my very first blog entry has proven a rather difficult exercise… I have cleaned my apartment several times, groomed the cat, cleaned my apartment again, surfed the web, gone jogging… the list of infinitely more agreeable activities than blog writing stretches ahead for miles. So this one is a kind of personal ice-breaker if you will. Anyone who reads this will hopefully find it so bad that they will not be able to resist the temptation to come back in a few days to see if I could possibly bore them any further.

But most likely, not.

Seriously, though, I intend to use this space to talk about stuff that interests me, and, more often, the work that I’ve been doing in the hope that I’ll get more. Right now I’m in the process of going through the masses of pictures I took on my recent trip to Sri Lanka and I will return shortly to upload some of the most inspiring ones. Watch this space!