Revolver Red Wine

If you go to Revolver Upstairs in Prahran right now you will see my artwork along side a few Banksy works (his stuff is behind glass, mine is not FYI). Lucie asked me to do an artwork months and months ago and I kept thinking I had ages and ages to do it. Then after the trip I realised I had days. As I keep telling/kidding myself, working with a crazy deadline is a bit of a creative thrill ride.

I decided to draw a bunch of wine drinkers in ink as a little homage to red wine and winter. The artwork is HUGE, a few meters by a few meter and my photoshop had a hard time dealing with the first file I started. If you're in the area pop on by, they have good food big couches, free sega games and I'm sure some memories of nights out from the past.

Hey Brisbane...

Hey Brisbane, what are you doing this weekend? We are flying up tomorrow to do Finders Keepers Market on the weekend. All the details are over at the Finders Keepers website. There are loads of lovely Melbourne people who will also be there, enjoying some warm weather. It really feels like a European winter here in Melbourne and I think this is due to being in a warm climate when the Autumn into Winter transition happened. I think it is the way the sky sits really low and everything has this coldness to it, especially the inside of your chest when you're riding home at 7.30pm. But Brisbane, it's t-shirt weather in Brisbane!



I just realised this is that blog post where I mostly talk about the weather. I think they warn you about writing that blog post.....

Signs

One of the things I found really interesting about travelling across the US was the signs they used for different businesses. My favourites were the older ones from the '50s and '60s, often for run down or even abandoned motels that were falling apart but had this old style charm that modern signs often lack.

A street in Albuquerque had around 15 or so of them and I tried to photograph them as we drove along also spotting a few buildings from the show Breaking Bad. When we got back I set about designing some new cards based on the signs. If we could incorporate LED/Neon lights into our cards you know we would be onto that in a flash (pun not intended). Epson, when are you going to make a printer that does that? We have three cards so far, for a birthday, baby and thank you and will be adding more to the range, so if you have a suggestion please let us know.

An Able and Game advert

I Touched A Cat - Able and Game from Jasmine Velickovic on Vimeo.

Back in March we got an email from Jasmine, a third year film and television student from Swinburne who wanted to create a commercial for us for one of her projects. I think we got the email on a Sunday night and when Gareth and I saw each other we were both really excited, asking if we had both read that email.

We met up with Jasmine and spoke about lots of different ways we could turn our cards into a story for a commercial and somehow the I touched a cat and I liked it card got mentioned. It was great fun brainstorming ideas and thinking about our product in a completely different context and Jasmine had some interesting 'outsider perspective' ideas we probably wouldn't have thought of. After our chat Jasmine went off and came up with a script, then set about finding some actors to cast. We got a few sneak peeks and I was really getting excited about seeing the final product and about a week before it was finished I was thinking about it a lot. Jasmine came around the day before we went on our trip (high priority before we left) with the DVD to watch it and we both decided it was the best thing ever.

Jasmine told us that on the day of filming it was super hot but David had to wear the woollen jumper (I'm sure I've drawn something similar before, the outfit was very Able and Game). Pepe the cat didn't come from this lady, but is in fact Jasmine's cat. The last shot of David and Pepe took a few takes to try and get Pepe in the actual shot. Turns out the old adage don't work with kids and animals might be true.

Jasmine was also a total sweetheart and got us a present to say thank you, which was completely unnecessary but totally perfect for the office:

Keeping a Travel Journal

Almost every time I've been overseas I've ended up keeping a travel journal of some description. Although when I use the word journal it makes me think of a word heavy "so we got up and went and had a cup of tea and a bun and walked around looking at all the roses" and this isn't what I'm really talking about. It is more a documentation of a trip using drawings, words and scraps of paper (my sister, after I pulled the newest one out last weekend looked at it and said that is a scrapbook).

I don't usually put photos in, but the last one from the UK trip has spots where I meant to put them in but never printed them off. Although I take loads of photos, I know I'll never print them out and I've never been one for photo albums either, so it is nice to still have a memento of a trip that you can refer back to that is very visual.

Because most of them have involved Scotland it was nice to look over old journals when Gareth's parents were out and remember places we ate, who ate what how much it cost. I can instantly remember things much better after reading them so it really does serve a purpose when you want to remember a trip.

I want to quickly mention The Journey is the Destination by Dan Eldon, a book I got back in 1997 when I was in Year 12. This is the travel journal to end all travel journals. The fact that he died, was good looking and an amazing artist definitely left an impression on me as a 17 year old and I kept a similar one during my exchange to Belgium the following year.


Here are my tips on what to do although please feel free to pick and choose what you want. Each time I do something different but still try to keep the whole thing consistent, so ended up trying to remember every subway journey we took, complete with maps for this trip.


Materials

The Paper. Get a decent journal. I think hardcover works best as it gives you something to work on if you don't have a flat surface. Plus it is nice to have something sturdy that will last and look good on a book shelf.

Colours. Pencils, textas or watercolour paints, whatever tickles your fancy. I like to buy my supplies when I get to the destination as it gives you a chance to check out an art supply store and maybe find things you don't normally work with.

Sticky stuff. You need some decent tape. In the past I used normal cello tape but this doesn't last (for years) or glue (but you can stick things in a flap revealing the other side). This time I got some white washi tape from Japan. Although I'm not sure how long it will last it was good because you could see through it, remove it easily if you stuck something in the wrong spot, tear it off easily and write over it. All big ticks, so let's hope it lasts.

These are the supplies I got for the trip just gone. The sketchbook was the perfect size (around A5) for my handbag and I had a little pencil case for my pens and tape.

This is from our 2010/2011 trip to the UK. I ended up buying some lovely watercolours although they were not always convenient to use. But a long afternoon in a pub was a perfect time to crack them open and draw some beer.

What to include

When I first started keeping a journal it was all about what we ate out. Now I include everything we ate along with little maps, paper goods collected at different places, people we met and places we went. I also use it as a sketchbook when I visited museums so it kind of covers all bases.

Little snippets of things from restaurants are great to stick in, but sometimes can take up loads of space. Work out how many pages you have for each day to spread everything out.

On the left are some drawings from the Museum of Natural History, on the right is our lunch at an odd bar/burger place. Sometimes documenting stuff can be tiring, especially if you want to enjoy the moment. If this is the case I'll just try to remember things and do it later on.

This is from my 2003 journal and was very messy and had few drawings. It has some errors (it should read we CAN see Ireland through the haze) but I love the fact that I included a pint tally and the songs that played in the pub in Port Patrick. Although it is visually not that great it is still lots of fun to read over.

Day Six and Everything Else

Day Six: Little Rock to Oklahoma City
Day Seven: Oklahoma City to Amarillo
Day Eight: Amarillo to Albuquerque
Day Nine: Albuquerque to Flagstaff
Day Ten: Flagstaff to Las Vegas (via The Grand Canyon)
Day Thirteen: Las Vegas to Los Angeles

We are back in Australia and I got lazy and didn't blog about it every day. Over promise and under deliver. CHECK!

So rather than post one by one you're going to get a mega post last week of the holiday recap.

In Oklahoma we went to a waterpark. I've been wanting to go to one for ages (years) and consider myself a bit of a thrill seeker. I've bungee jumped off this bridge so always thought I was cool with heights. Guess what stops you from being cool with heights? Age. Add another 10 years and the fear goes up exponentially and I'm not sure if I could actually bungee jump again. There were a couple of slides that I decided I couldn't go on, they looked like one wrong move and you're dead type of slides. Steep, fast and on some occasions people seems to be some airtime. Some of the slides were up on 7 or 8 storey high constructions. One had me worried due to its rust and general thinness on the stairs. The other had Gareth feeling a little more secure, telling me wood doesn't rust. No it rots Gareth, it rots!





In Amarillo we met a woman who could have organised a meet with one Barack Obama, but alas we were not in the same town at the same time. Gareth's response to the possibility of meeting Bamy: We might need to get better outfits.

We hit Albuquerque early and drove around looking at Breaking Bad sites. This was exciting, but also creepy. Oh look it's Jesse's aunts house. How dare they built a garage, that's where the RV goes.

On the way to Flagstaff we stopped off at a few national parks, including the Petrified Forest and Walnut Canyon. The high altitude didn't get us any Brownlow Medal wins, but we did find pints of PBR for $1.50 each during happy hour. They were normally $2. Bless the cheap beer.

The Grand Canyon was interesting. Sure it was one of the best, most surreal views you will ever see and you will struggle to take it all in. Then there are the people. It isn't till you leave Australia you realise how safety conscious it is. If that hole was in Australia there would be 10 meter walls around it. We saw so many people getting very close to the edge and got a bit freaked out by it all. We wanted our secure wall, we didn't want to see people die! Then found a book in a gift shop detailing all the deaths at the canyon. It was arranged in sections for the different types of death and would have taken up half our allocated luggage weight had we purchased a copy. My morbid curiosity didn't quite beat having to offload all my clothing just to get it home.

My people highlight however was a couple we saw just as we arrived at the car park. They walked towards their car, opened the door and began baby talking and I started to get concerned they had left a baby inside. But then we saw them putting a cat into the man's backpack. They took their cat to the Grand Canyon and put it in a backpack with its head popping out. I'm only guessing so it could take in the view.

Las Vegas was something I was super excited about but found it a bit blergy. We were there on the weekend, there was a heatwave going on (44 C degrees) and our poor precious baby lungs had a hard time dealing with the indoor smoking so we felt like cranky old people tut tutting at everything. It wasn't all bad though, we did get to eat at some nice restaurants including Craft Steak, Tom Colicchio from Top Chef's place, an epic meal that beat the both of us down.

We got to LA with an extra day as we ended up skipping Fort Smith on the road trip (sorry Arkansas). We did a few dorky tourist things, took a drive along Mulholland and walked along Venice Beach. That end of holiday feeling, a mixture of sadness it is over plus a huge desire to go home coupled with the dread of a long haul flight kinda loomed over us as well. The flight home wasn't too bad in the end as we left late at night which meant we slept pretty well and arrived home again in the morning.

So that is the end. Back to work work work!

Road Trip Day Five: Memphis Tennessee to Little Rock Arkansas

Route: Memphis Tennessee to Little Rock Arkansas
Date: Sunday 9th June
Departed: 2.15 pm
Arrived: 5 pm
Stops: None
Distance: 242 km
Arguments: dunno


Today we had a lovely relaxed morning. We stayed with Taryn on airbnb.com and she makes the best cookies we've ever tried. We had an amazing breakfast and morning tea and hung out with her and her cute cat. Then we headed over to Mud Island (as far as I could tell it isn't a real island, but there are two bridges and a monorail to get to it, so it feels very important!). I'd read there was a civil war reenactment and I wanted to see it. Turns out there was people in costumes and old school guns going off, but no actual reenactment. What they did have was this huge model of the Mississippi River. It's worth going over just to see it and although it's a little dated, this adds to its appeal. We also went to the Metal Museum. Biggest disappointment there was that I didn't get to see the two house cats that lived there (they had a white one that apparently wasn't white anymore, I discovered their food was in the blacksmith shed and made enquiries about them). They had two exhibitions that were amazing, one by Lauren Kalman and another by Virgil England: http://www.metalmuseum.org/exhibits.html both worth looking up.