"Beware Teenage Girls" - a lesbian poem

Been a busy couple of months, what with a month in California. When I have time I'll write a full post on that. Right now I'm just re-building my life, moved out of the van into a house, doing little bits and pieces of illustration work and trying to find a day job. I've been reading a lot of Beat poetry (mostly Ginsberg and Karaouc) and recent events inspired me to right the following poem, written in my friend's Croydon flat while I was waiting for him to get off the phone with his cousin.

Beware teenage girls
with narriow hips
and puckered lips
wondering hands
and perky tits
those trippy hippy chicks
who chase dicks, but
gaze into your eyes
and sneak kisses under starry skies
and sooth the raging beast inside your soul
and tame with wild animal
till you crave her taste and waste your time
imagining the many crimes
you'd commit to get
your hands upon her tits
and while your heart starts to sing for her, no end
she's describing you to her little friends;
the woman she met at some party
where the music is dark and arty
and the drugs are fresh and free
and the dykes are lonely and naive
and you were just an experiment
and she did not know, to you, just how much
that fucked snog meant.

- Rae Wetherill

Attachment Parent Illustrations

Illustrations for a leaflet for Attachment Parenting UK. First time I think I've ever drawn a baby, or a breast feeding woman...

Sunset Festival 2012

Phew, the festival is over! A culmination of a couples work that felt like an acceleration through chaos, pain and sacrifice to reach a goal of pure light, love and family. What I really mean to say is 7 days of back breaking labour, mud, blisters, sun, rain, wind, stress, sleep deprivation and an eventual running out of food, but which culminated in a beautiful coming together of community, music, smiley faces and overall success of Sunset Festival 2012, the first I'm sure of many. Crewing on a festival is hard, but organising one is harder! It's gonna take a whole winter of relaxation to absorb the incredible-ness of it all.

Talented festi photographer Mark Falmouth captured the festival beautifully, including the build here. Here are a few highlights:

Photography by the great Mark Falmouth http://www.flickr.com/photos/markfalmouth/collections/

We called it Sunset as a representation of the end of one thing, and the dawning of a new era, and it certainly is as in 7 days time I'll be flying off, alone, to San Francsico for a month of adventures.

Naughty Wizard

Phew! The last few months have been insane. I'm now living in a van in the country side (or to be more exact, living in a van on a friend's driveway but free to use amenities such as kitchen and shower, and not exactly the countryside but in Ivybridge, a suburban village on the edge of the Moors.)

I thought now that I've finished uni I'd have more time to concentrate on some personal drawing projects. Yeah right! Actually, I've been really busy. Going to festivals, working on my music, making plans. I'm travelling to San Francisco next month for a while, but before that is Sunset Festival. Somehow, straight out of uni, I've found I've become stage manager of the Open Mic stage at the upcoming Sunset Festival. Being one of the core crew is sometimes overwhelming task, creatively I'm loving building sculptural pieces and decorative shit for the stage (photos coming soon), though on a more practical level finding things like a PA system has been difficult. Being part of the core crew can be flexible, you get as much out of it as you put in. Some members of the core crew have full time jobs and can only devote a percentage of their time and energy to this project. I, on the other hand, have devoted nearly all my time, energy, and resources to it. Its great to have something to focus my creative energy on but somedays I find myself thinking "Ugh, I'm so fucking busy all this time! This fucking festi!"

I know it's going to be beautiful when we finally pull it off, but I know there is going to be more stress and probably a few tears before we can finally stand at the front of the dance floor together in unity (or for me, sit at the back of the Open Mic stage attempting to figure out how to use a mixing desk for the first time.) Check out Sunset Festival for banging Psytrance, community spirit, family run cafe and acoustic Open Mic!

Meanwhile, I've been putting the finishing touches to the Spiritgarden Ethnobotanicals catalog with this illustration I call "The Naughty Wizard." I haven't actually drawn anything for a couple of months now,  feels good!

Doodles

The degree shoe has gone up, uni is finished and I am free! Free to wander this limbo land of not really knowing what to do with myself, free to be shit-scared I won't find me purpose. Luckily I have amazing friends who have put me up for the summer while I bumble around and try to get a fix on the grown-up world.

Today I've been invijulating the show, hanging around with a couple of other illustrators and thinking up drawing games to keep us occupied. After a belgian man wondered into the studio and proclaimed himself Death Metal's most prolific logo and album art designer we decided to make up a random Death Metal band (named "Assorted Baby Heads") and challenge each other to design the logo in 10 minutes (extended to 12). By the end of the day I'd made up a few band members and a history.

Felicity Scum, bass player for Assorted Baby Heads. 

Plant a Seed

The End is Nigh...

So it's that time of year again: taking down the studio. That involves a week of 20 sweaty illustrators shifting tables and chairs that normally seat about 130 people, painting about 100 8 foot high wooden walls and building an exhibition. It signals the end of the academic year, when we exhibit our work from the last year and then don our bikinis and sun hats and disappear for the summer. Only this time, for me, it's my last one, because somehow I made it to my third year. Some pangs of nostalgia, but mostly, I feel ready and happy to move on. It goes to show how much I've grown over the last 3 years. When I started uni I was still a child, now I am an adult, mature and ready to tackle the adult world.

Yeah, so mature. Pic's taken by Pete Merrel for Tracey Wright. 

Our 3rd year degree show exhibition opens on the evening of June 15th, and stays open for a couple of weeks, so come down to the Roland Levinsky Building 1st floor, Plymouth Uni, for cutting edge artwork from the next generation of highly trained illustrators (and artwork from me, as well...)

The Ukulele Tree - Now exists somewhere other than my imagination!

Culmination of 6 months of work, and tears (because I think this is the most important thing I've created) edited into 15 minutes.

Post 100!

Hooray! I have reached my hundredth post! Gosh! Bloody hell! This is probably the longest running of any of my internet projects. I've had about a million websites, blogs, youtube channels, deviantart accounts and email accounts. This one I feel a particular tenderness for, it's grown along with me. I'll be finishing uni soon, but this blog will continue for as long as I have stories to tell and memories to share.

The Ukulele Tree - first field test

Had my first workshop on saturday! It was pretty successful, we had 6 people come. 2 Little girls, and a range of adults. I'm happy people didn't assume it was for children only, I'm much happier having a range or indeed just adults. I was very nervous the morning of the workshop but mostly about things were beyond my control: what if nobody turns up? What some strings break? What if theres an earthquake? As it happened one ukulele did explode, but since that happened I felt a little more comfortable. If I can deal with an exploding Ukulele then I can deal with anything! 

The workshop was videoed and I'm currently working on editing that together. In the mean time here are some pictures of happy smiling people holding Ukuleles! 

Looking back at the footage I look pretty together, confident and eloquent. A sign of how nervous and hyped up on adrenaline can be seen here; my blushing, a symptom of my severe rosacea which I've had since I was 15. Breakouts caused by alcohol, spicy food, hot showers or stress. 

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." - Carl Jung And, if like me, your puny netbook is too narrow to veiw youtube videos with my blogs current layout, go here.

Remember when I used to post things on this blog other than photos and artwork? This is really whats on my mind at the moment. Self-work. It sounds really egotistical and self-involved, but for me, personally, individually, working alone, its a quiet and occasionally traumatic journey of inner self discovery. Observing the past, looking at how the past effects my present behaviour and programing like pebbles rippling in a pond. Trying to come to an awareness. I've learnt that "trying" and "aware" don't belong in the same breath, its an oxymoron. As soon as you are aware you are aware, you are like...double-aware. Does that make sense? It's like lucid dreaming. I'm lucid living. Or I'm getting there. Ooooh. That rhymed. Thats totally going into a song...deeeeeep maaaan....

21st Birthday

So last month was my 21st birthday! I've been so busy the last couple of months, uni is really kicking off now. I have 7 weeks and then I'll be finished forever! Whoa! In the last month alone I've written 14,000 words, and I'm giving my first Ukulele workshop on saturday! And I've got to sort out my portfolio... Anyway, last month was my 21st birthday and my best friend's 22nd birthday on the same weekend so we managed to get 15 of our closest friends to our favourite campsite and had a lovely relaxing 4 days chilling round the campfire. Here's a few pics from that weekend. I love my happy hippy family :)

One from TJ

Picture by Alex. I'm the fooked hippy on the right. It had been a long day :) 

Another one from Alex.

This one is from the wonderful Pam: http://www.h-pinkness.com/

Paul and Dorothy

Paul Mccartney and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz playing the Ukulele together. This is the center piece to page of song chords for my Ukulele booklet. I didn't mean to make Dorothy so nervous looking, but then I'd be nervous if Paul was looking at me that way...


I should explain, to the left is a page which has the chords for the song "Let it Be" and to the right will be a page of chords for "Somewhere over the Rainbow."

Self-Portrait

Getting back into the watercolours. Here's a portrait of me looking moody :) 

The Ukulele Tree - Mark 2

There is a Mark 1, but it's rubbish, literally! Mark 1 is a mutilated umbrella and is nowhere near finished. I found some abandoned tree branches left behind by council tree surgeons, and in a day I turned it into the Mark 2.