Latest Artwork

This was an image I drew for a drawing competition. I ended up leaving it "artfully unfinished" cause I didn't have enough time.

It turned out pretty wonky but still fairly satisfying, considering it's crayola. The original photograph I was working with was from a project I did where I took photos of me with my face painted to match my shirt. It's not a particularly flattering picture, but interesting enough.

 I'll try and update the site more often as I do work. It's just hard to get around to actually scanning and digitising the work, particularly as I have rather a lot to juggle, and my computer is an old dinosaur.

Don't expect frequent updates, despite my good intentions

I was killing some time in the holidays and I decided to do an altered book. I found a suitable book at the second hand store for $3 - a marriage manual by Hannah and Abraham Stone. It's from 1937 so I expected the writing to be incredibly outdated. Surprisingly, a lot of the information is quite decent and still applies, being as it mainly relates to biology and science rather than morals and social norms. It even says that x rays to the testicles are not a good form of contraception. Who knew?

The book's about gender, in a way. Of course, my ideas deteriorated somewhat. It's barely finished, I'd say I've only altered about 1/10th of it!

You'll have to forgive me for my scans, hardback books don't always scan properly.

Ta da! The main thing with this one was trying to draw them in exactly the same place. I did another one later in the book:

Turns out the pages in the main body of the book don't showcase pencil very well. Who knew?

Don't mind my terrible gender politics here.

I originally intended to do some wallpaper with negative spaces, then I gave up and drew the guy over the top, using only basic colours (a fairly standard red, blue, brown, green, yellow, white and black.)I did something similar later on, except I chose a less standard set of restrictive colours. This is Roisin Murphy, but I drew a beard on her. Along the same lines, this is Robert Del Naja aka 3D from Massive Attack. I chose him to turn into art nouveau because he just has the appearance of an entirely normal looking man. If that makes sense. It probably doesn't. Funnily enough, this is the second Robert for me to turn into Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau's a very bothersome, time consuming style, which I get reminded of whenever I try to attempt it.

Speaking of 3D, I implore you to watch this video for Butterfly Caught by Massive Attack. Although it's by far not the best Massive Attack song, or my favourite, it's very visually intriguing. (When people ask what inspires me, it's usually stuff like this as opposed to fine artists!)This one's done in ordinary crayola crayons. I left my test strip in (one unwrapped green crayon looks much the same as another until you test them and one's lime green and one's forest green.)This one isn't that good. I limited the colours on the face but not on the hair/snail. Snails are hermaphrodites. It's time for self portraits! (Just in case I hadn't already had enough of them.) I also did a strange androgyny/transgender one:And now available with gender differentiation!Apparently the male one makes me look like George Michael. C'est la vie.  Ships are always she,  and for some reason people always presume animals are "he" until proven otherwise. The ship lady turns up in some of my later work, with a face!

Until next time. The book isn't finished, but I've put it on indefinite hold. Run out of inspiration/have too much other stuff to do. Enjoy.

This was something I did for university last year - screen prints. We were told to do something related to the theme of place (our take on our own place). Unfortunately I'm a literal thinker, so I quickly found myself hating the task, and I decided to just have some fun with screen printing instead.

 I won't try and use a convoluted justification for these, as I did in my assessment. Instead, these are things, with moustaches. 

Your eyes do not deceive you, this fellow is printed in a burnt umber. I thought black and white was a little too harsh. Unfortunately Photoshop seems to think these are in black and white; luckily they don't require much in the way of colour correction. Thank heavens for my new, smashing scanner!

These prints are all around 10 by 15cm. They're separate prints on quality paper measuring 18 by 25cm. 

Truth be told I wanted to create prints that would be good designs. I ended up printing these on a variety of different fabrics. I made a waistcoat out of a yellow sateen, printed with these moustached characters. Unfortunately I don't have a photograph of it, because I think I did a very good job. I've misplaced some of the fabric I printed, which is disappointing.

I tried printing light on dark, but this design set doesn't work nearly so nicely in negative.

Here you can see the fine lines possible using photo emulsion. However, you can see all the imperfections which are all too easy to achieve in photo emulsion and in screen printing. It's possible to have perfect prints, but for me at least, so rare. 

However, doing a run of near-perfect prints wasn't interesting enough. As well as printing on fabric, I experimented with printing over a damask design I'd printed, with varying success. Here are some of the better ones.

This last one's been exaggerated a little with colour correction.

So that was it for my little experiment. I should try doing something with these for Threadless, but I'll probably never get around to it.

Just a quick update. 

I was given a green egg carton to fill with eggs and decided to take a little more care than I usually do with my carton illustrations (usually just rapid sketches of chickens.) 

I did a Munch inspired one before (Screamin' chicken eggs - a play on "Squawkin' Chicken eggs" which is what I usually call them) with a hen reenacting the scream, but this time I decided to do a Mucha inspired work.

Enjoy. There might be more box art to come later.

This is a piece of work inspired by the hilariously terrible yet amazing surreal montage art on the cover of Choose Your Own Adventure game books, and the box art of Atari games. 

First I was shown this brilliant art done for Panic Software and the style reminded me a little of the covers of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The Choose Your Own Adventure books often featured strange montages of monsters, caves, forbidden lands, children dressed in 1980s fashions running away from smug heads in the sky....the Giant Floating Head seemed to be a common theme. You can see some of the book covers here

This features my brother's head in the sky, the other objects have nothing to do with anything, they just feature frequently in this style of art for some reason. I am definitely not as good with watercolour as the artist who produced the magnificent Panic Software artwork, but all in all it's a bit of fun.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

THE WEB DEVELOPER!

I'm not sure how this came about. I think a friend of mine drew a picture, said it was bad (it was actually a very good drawing) and I decided to show him just how infinitely worse I could make a picture of the same subject - so I drew the same thing first holding a whiteboard marker in my mouth, then holding it in my foot. 

This, for some reason, got me thinking. Since a lot of artistic training is in the mind rather than in the hands, how would it be if you used something other than your dominent hand to draw? One's mind still works the same way, one still knows how to draw, but it's difficult to get, say, your foot, to work the same way as your hand, even when recieving exactly the same instructions from your mind.

There was only one way to test this. To draw exactly the same thing in 5 different ways.

• Right hand - control
• Left hand
• Holding the pen/brush in my teeth
• Holding the pen/brush with my foot
• Completely blindfolded  

The last one is important, not a blind drawing, completely blindfolded, so I have no idea what colour I'm using, where the paper is, I can't look at the reference if I use one..etc.

First, a unicorn:

Right:

This is also done with oil pastels - hell in itself. A decidedly crappy medium, I have no idea how anyone gets any sort of detail with these.

Left:

Well it's got that characteristic left-hang-wiggliness about it, but instead of looking like a "bad drawing" (read no grasp on anatomy) it looks more like a drawing done by someone with parkinson's disease.

Mouth:

Once I started holding the brush in my molars instead of my front teeth, this wasn't too hard at all. You do have to use a brush though, it's near impossible to use a media that requires any sort of pressure. I tried with a pastel first and since my face was about 5cm away from the page I quickly scrapped that idea.

Foot:

Got off to a good start with the face, and then..my foot got tired. You can forget this one.

Blind:

I think this one isn't helped by the fact that the media meant I had to take the brush off the page and I lost my place.

So Ok, that was that then. But unicorns are rather too easy, what about doing something I'm a) not used to drawing and b) working from the same reference.

So I chose a beetle.

So we can obviously draw the conclusion that it is possible to do a competant line drawing using a brush held in one's teeth..but what about a proper drawing, with colouring and detail? I decided to try that out, using a picture of Aphex Twin as the starting point. (I'm not a fan of Aphex Twin, but I think his..persona, if you could call it that, is hilarious.)

The Rules:

I can pick up the paintbrush to put it in my mouth with my hands. I can use my hands to change brush size. However, my hands cannot make a mark on the paper. I have to wash my brush and change colours using only my mouth. 

So I had to do the sketch in watercolour, as opposed to pencil, due to the whole pressure thing.

One problem with the lame watercolours I was using.. no black. I tried to use a black inktense pencil to get me some more black, but that wasn't terribly easy to control with my teeth...

And finally, finished! Well, considering I used my mouth I think I did a pretty decent job. Now that's it, and hopefully onto some more serious art.

While visiting clients from hell - a site where all designers, illustrators and developers can come forward and reveal their worst clients and client request - I came across this unbelievably awful request for a logo:

 Logo with Flare

Client: I already know what I want for the logo. It’s a house, with a face, and it’s on wheels with an exhaust pipe coming out of the back which is shooting out smoke in the shape of dollar signs.

 Naturally I began to envisage how hilariously disgusting this logo would be, and decided I'd have to draw it. So here it is. Just a simple deal with inktense derwent pencils.

However I just know that if I were unlucky enough to deal with that particular client, they would probably have said "those dollar signs aren't visible enough, can you make them a little more..ostentateous?"

 (At this moment in time I am very tired of serious art, and so I only have the ability to do jocular things like this. It will probably be quite some time before I can bring myself to do something considered, or any sort of major project. I've completely run out of ideas. Such is university's effect on the young, easily discouraged and tired mind)

I had to do a course in computers at university, which to be honest did not teach me much that I didn't already know. I found it to be a bit of an exercise in tedium, but I did have an excuse to get back into one of my favourite vector programs. 

We were supposed to have 10 to 15 images created, and put in a basic Dreamweaver style website. However I preferred to make my site look decent, and concentrate on making good quality images (even though I'm sure that I would have passed, or even gotten a good mark with rubbish ones. The image quality wasn't the point of this assignment - but to be honest I strongly dislike handing in things that I am not proud of.)

There was a loose theme of "self portrait" which I swiftly threw out the window and did anything I wanted to instead.

Carrara

This isn't the first three dimensional modelling program I have used, the last was Rhinoceros in 2003.

As a basic exercise we were told to create a snowman, except I decided to make mine out of icosahedrons instead of spheres. I think he looks reasonably spiffing

I'm not too fond of this house, but I had to do something. And it was easier to do something square.

Photoshop. I'm not fond of this program, I'll be honest, possibly because I don't have a graphics tablet. I only really use it to levels correct and resize images. So I struggled to digitally paint in it, and in the end got these four relatively decent images together.

This is a swimming quagga (an extinct subspecies of the Plains zebra.) I drew the outline a long time ago with MS paint, and just never finished it. (Don't laugh, I was quite good at MS Paint!) I would have liked to have done water effects with this, but my skill with PS doesn't stretch to that.

I spent one of our lessons just drawing over my face and turning myself into the Joker.

This one is merely a bird with some blossoms. I deliberately kept it quite basic, for me, often simpler is easier. I sometimes prefer to use basic limited tools rather than comprehensive ones. 

This one is my favourite Photoshop one; a coloured version of an ink drawing I'd done (I did several moustachioed characters - mainly objects, in ink, so that I could screenprint them onto fabric.)

Now onto the vectors:

Just a basic self portrait as some sort of zombie thing.

I turned one of my moustachioed characters, a pear in this case, painstakingly into a vector.

I really wanted to play around with colours and transparency in this one, so I drew myself wearing a white piped dress and very colourful petticoat. The tulle colours overlaying each other is one of my favourite parts. I was very pleased with this one.

This one was just a ridiculous joke gone out of proportion, but what's wrong with that? When I jokingly suggested I'd draw Robert Smith as Art Nouveau, my friend insisted I carry the threat out. This is based on the beautifully florid works of Alphonse Mucha, which have WAY too many flourishes and details for me to be able to even come close to replicating.

My friend also did his own version of Art Nouveau Robert Smith, and his is very well worth a look.

I'm not sure I should like to be forced to do so many digital images again, but I am reminded of why I enjoy creating vectors, and  I feel I should keep that up. If only I had a tablet...

I was actually intending to do a series of self portraits, but luckily I decided not to, because upon my return to university it turned out that I had to do self portraits all the time. For this task the portrait didn't have to be representational, but somehow I find myself unable to do non representational work. 

Instead I decided to "deconstruct" my face - starting with a realistic feather painting, than gradually doing more paintings subtracting more elements and realism until I was left with virtually nothing.

I had two days, but I knew I would only be able to use one (as the next week I would be in convalescence because I had to get my wisdom teeth out.) Unfortunately..I work far too fast. I was finished all the paintings by midday.

My starting point. This one took me the longest, naturally - probably about 40 minutes.

I'm trying to put these in descending order from "most realistic" to "least realistic" but sometimes it can be a little muddy. I also intended to go from large feathers down to tiny ones, but that got a bit muddy too. However my first feather is significantly larger than my last.

I'm beginning to lose my facial features. The first portrait is 5cm by 5cm on a cockatoo wing feather measuring 24cm by 5cm. The last portrait is 3mm by 1cm on a chicken feather measuring 6cm by 2cm.

 That was all very well but I still had a lot of time left over. So I did these:

I'm not sure how I managed to look so 70s. It isn't just the colour scheme (this, the small orange/yellow feather earlier, and the other feathers below are all hand dyed cockatoo feathers.)

The teacher suggested I deliberately split a feather. I burned the other one.

Finally, a "complimentary", inspired by my classmate's typewriter.

For my brother's birthday I decided to make him a number of characters from the ngmoco/hand circus game Rolando 2 - Quest for the golden orchid. The original characters were designed by Mikko Walamies and can be seen here at the rolando 2 website

From left to right; the Floating Friend, Lord Derby Disraeli (royal treasurer), the King rolando, Major James Cardigan (royal spiky commando), Turgut Reiss (reformed pirate) and Mr Scruff, the DJ who made the music for the game. I posed them with a 30 cm ruler and a standard wine bottle to give you an idea of the scale. The small rolandos were patterned off a superball. The King was patterned off a lemon, and the Floating Friend from an orange. They are made out of polar fleece and/or corduroy, hand coloured and embroidered.

My brother took some (much nicer) photos which I have included just below:

The floating friend has two forms, the one I made was the huge floating sphere the friend becomes when he eats chilli.

 I hope you enjoy my interpretations of these rolandos.

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I had to do a project that incorporated some kind of stitching for textiles at uni. 

So I built on my Beth Gibbons embroidery into some crazy multilayered eye embroidery applique.

It's not actually very easy to photograph or scan because it's not a perfect square.

I decided to play on the richness of patterned fabrics - brocades, silk charmeuses, burnout velvets and shimmering satins and silks, combined with the dazzling bejewelled effect of both stylised and more realistic eyes.

Hopefully you enjoy it more than my teachers did. The textiles teachers are really quite harsh, and one of them seemed to think I didn't display the necessary commitment even though I spent THREE WEEKS non stop doing this! I'm actually seriously considering transferring workshops - even though I love the work in textiles I'm really not sure I can keep on for another two and a half years with such critical and demanding teachers.

 Oh well..I'm proud even if they aren't.

Ok well since embroidery takes such a long time it's nice to be able to embroider a few small things, just to check technique. Usually small motifs like flowers are used, but I find eyes much more interesting and expressive - the iris also gives you the chance to try out many variations of colour. 

These are embroidered on a yellow plastic bag from a CD retailer, couched with a post it note.

It wasn't actually too difficult to embroider on this surface, although fabric would have been easier.

The stitches in this eye are scroll stitch for the yellow at the top of the eye, buttonhole stitch (which I now love) for the iris and lower eyelid, split stitch for the pupil, running stitch for the pink area and feather stitch and chain stitch for the other stuff. I tried to do french knots and turk's head knots but I can't do knots without them knotting in the WRONG place and getting a huge mess.

Much the same stitches used in these, with the addition of an open chain stitch for the lower lid. Embroidery is smashing! And since I'll probably be doing a huge project or two in textiles based JUST around eyes..I expect you'll see a lot of this sort of thing in the future.

It's at 8:29 in the Portishead short film To Kill A Dead Man 

I'd recommend you watch the film even if you are not a fan of Portishead; as it has a chilling score and incredible noir atmosphere. Well worth a look.

  And 8:29? Well I decided to embroider it. Which was a terrible idea. As a general rule, embroidery is done of small motifs and designs, rather than PICTURES, this is because it takes forever. It is possibly the slowest art form ever, even slower than assembling someone's face out of the circles cut from a hole puncher. To embroider as much as I did took TWO DAYS (it's about life sized if you want to know) so I decided to call it finished.

Why embroidery? Well I love its richness and its dimensionality..I'm not actually very good at it though. Oh well, c'est la vie, I can't just draw/paint things all the time.

Somehow I don't think she's smiling.

Apologies to Grant Wood and Edvard Munch. No apologies to Leonardo Da Vinci because I don't even like the Mona Lisa, I think it's boring as hell and doesn't deserve to be the most famous painting ever. 

So..I'm not exactly sure how I arrived at this idea but I decided to paint some feathers again..and I decided to paint some trinketty rubbishy colourful cheap and nasty sort of circusy stuff.

first this carousel horse. I got a bit lazy on the mane. Reference from creative commons The photo is more beautiful than my painting..but it isn't too easy to paint on a feather so I'll give myself that much.

This one's from a little still life I set up; a bird skull and beads. I have no idea where the skull is from, I just found it one day. It doesn't have a beak attached..but it definitely seems more avian than rodent, and it's probably only a couple of cm long/wide.

 This one seems more impressionist than the other two. It's inspired by my father mistaking a picture of Alison Goldfrapp in a clown costume for a picture of a dog! (To be fair it was very low light when I showed him.) Not really any reference for the dog. The clown costume is much influenced by the album leaflet in Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree.

I've scrambled the order in which I painted them (cause it looked better.) The still life was first, the carousel horse second and the dog third.

 All three feathers are hand dyed cockatoo feathers, and each one is about 20cm long (including the shaft) and 5 cm wide. The images are painted on with acrylic paint.

Back at the end of 2007 I had the naive idea that I would send around a book to be altered. This book is called "Great Stars of Hollywood's Golden Age" and despite the aghast manner in which someone treated me when they found out I was destroying books..this campy little paperback was heading towards the rubbish when my brother found it on a nature strip.

I am now taking my plea to the internet. Is there anyone interested in altering a book? If I get sufficient interest (either comment below or email me at louisa.giffard@gmail.com) I'll consider sending it out, to be sent to artistic types around the country (or the world..) to be altered and added to. Nothing too gluey and chunky because with paperbacks it makes them almost impossible to close. I found that the hard way with the last book I did.

Below is just a little image I found in a Trentemoller CD that I liked, and drew on a page in purple pen. I just felt like drawing it..and..the book was there gathering dust so I decided I'd try and restart the "project."

Either that or I'll just do the entire book myself..as a sort of..alternative sketchbook. Fine either way but it would be interesting to make this a community project.

Hopefully this is interesting enough. I went sewing and made this vest/waistcoat out of corduroy. I made the petticoats a while ago. Just an excuse to dress up really.

It's got Scottish Highland buttons!

If you want to know who takes my photographs, it's my friend Emma

So in my class at uni we had to do self portraits. I decided to knit mine..so I dyed a whole bunch of white wool in different colours (everything has to have colours!) and then sorted it by value - dark, mid, light mid and light. 

Then I drew a picture of me peering down on a mirror, and charted the pattern. Blue is dark, red is mid, yellow is light mid and white is light.

My face stops where my scarf was. I wasn't sure whether I'd have time to knit the scarf so I turned the chart upside down and knitted from the top of my head down my face.

This is what I ended up with.

It's knitted using fairisle, but I did the fair isle pretty badly so the gods of Fair Isle would be down on me like a ton of bricks..

The colour variations are because I'd pick a light tone, a dark tone, mid and light mid, and I'd change colours whenever I ran out of that colour/OR I got bored of it. I had heaps of that pale apple green but I got sick of it after a while. I also couldn't be bothered knitting the scarf hence the brown and blue bands at the bottom.

My parents tell me it looks better further away. Over all, I'm pretty pleased with what I've done since I only had one day to do it in!

(Recycled food colouring dyed yarn..not sure what ply..um..8 ply? 4mm needles, it distorts a bit but roughly it's about 11.5cm wide by 18.5cm)

At university we've been doing textile arts (seeing as I do a textiles course) and we are focusing on knitting and crochet. I am not warming to crochet but seeing as I am already a reasonably competent knitter with a little fair isle experience, I've been trying to knit pictures.

I'm going to knit my self portrait tomorrow (with luck) but this is a little practice piece, it took a couple of hours from drawing the chart to casting off the knitting. It's about 10.5cm by 13cm, and it's a cow skull.

Needless to see it's not terribly easy to knit an image, and the skull got a bit..lost..so hopefully the self portrait will be better!

So I saw a photograph of this 6 legged deer in a news item (it most likely has too many limbs as a result of a genetic anomaly rather than anything more sinister)

I sketched it, and then later on I splashed the page with green and pink food colour, and drew over it with pencil and pen. There's something slightly apocalyptic, nuclear and nightmarish about it, like the landscape melting after an atomic bomb goes off.