SNOW

I watched this over the Christmas holidays. This song sums up Cardiff today!

Snow Day!

Made it into work to get sent back home. Here are some snowy pics of us outside. Check out the leopardprint wellies!

Swansea Print Workshop

In a break from my day-to-day work now as a Multimedia Designer, I spent a weekend in December down at the Swansea Print Workshop re-learning how to screenprint. The screen print workshop is like the tardis, it looks like a tiny house on a terraced street from the outside but once you are through that door it is huuuuuuuge! Thankyou to Kara for being patient and in showing me some great things. The place has a lovely atmosphere, with people dropping in and working quietly away on some amazing stuff. It was very inspiring to see so many prints done in so many ways of so many things, and there are some very talented children out there, as I couldn't believe how good some of the work on the walls was.

I haven't got my prints back yet as they were still drying on the Sunday when I left, but I'm hoping to get them back soon and am looking forward to seeing them again.

Swansea Print Workshop website: http://www.swanseaprintworkshop.org.uk/

Stonehenge

Summer Solstice. Stonehenge. New year. New start.

Swnfest Tequila Radio

Tequila Radio

Broadcasting tonight between 7 and 9, the blonder and younger Capper with a Swnfest Special. Expect updates and news from Swn over the next week or so on this blog aswell.

Cardiff Design Festival

I went and visited a few exhibitions around Cardiff as part of the Cardiff Design Festival. First up was the UWIC gallery in Capitol shopping centre. It's a fairly small gallery, and when I visited was showing the work of Austrian designers and students. For a small space, there was a lot of work shown, and it was nice to see international work as well as Welsh work being shown in the design festival.

The next stop on my quick tour was Bay Art where there was an exhibition of work by Tim Freeman, Liam O'Connor and Christopher Holloway. I didn't enjoy Chris Holloway's paintings as much as the other work in this show. I could see what the artist was aiming for with his paintings of distorted suburbia, but I felt that the computer manipulation they had undergone before being painted was too obvious and the use of fluorescent pink was overdone. The choice of images was interesting though and they all had a feeling of eerieness and waiting for the next scene about them. Tim Freeman's work was much more calm and muted, and left me puzzling over how he created it. Liam O'Connor's contribution to the show was his paintings of friends and family and of these I particularly liked the ones of people singing as there was a lot of motion to them and I liked the style of painting.

Chris Holloway

Tim Freeman

Liam O'Connor

After that I got down to the Wales Millenium Centre for the show of work by design agencies in and around Cardiff. I was very impressed by a lot of the work and overall there seemed to be a lot of green and eco designs. It was interesting for me to see the work of designers in Cardiff, to gain inspiration and also to get an idea of places that my work would suit and that I could apply for placements in.

Related Links:

http://www.cardiffdesignfestival.org
http://www.bayart.org.uk
http://www.wmc.org.uk
http://www.liammarcoconnor.com
http://www.uwic.ac.uk

Afterwards

I have now finished university. The last few weeks of putting together the final show and handing in all my work all went very quickly.

Anyways, I have been packing up my room and my things, ready for heading back to Cardiff. So expect a more Welsh flavour to my blogging from now on. Whilst sorting through my mountains of stuff gathered over the last year, I found so many things to post about on here. These alphabets are from a book called Decorative Alphabets through the Ages by Pat Russell. I really like them, and I would really like to do something inspired by them over the summer to keep my creative ways going. I've already made a "G" badge for myself out of one of them!

^ Fourteenth century letters taken from an embroidered altar cloth in the Church of St Mary at Soest in Westphalia.

^ Probably designed in Venice in the late sixteenth century.

^ This alphabet is called Lapidaire Monstre and is by the French type designer J.Midolle. The bottom third contains the surnames of famous men which correspond to each letter.

^ This work by John Smith is entitled Alphascape.