Caterpillar eyes

A quick post today, with a caterpillar question that maybe a butterfly person can answer for me.

After seeing the Orchard Swallowtail Butterfly lay eggs on our lemon tree the other month, I've been following its caterpillars while they grow up. I've found 6 and been taking photos of them growing and changing colour every few days. I'm hoping to get them in their cocoons and hatching (is that the right word?) and will do a full post afterward.

Today I noticed that all of them have black eyes except for one, which has light green eyes.

Is there a reason for the green eyes? Is it a different gender? Is it blind? Is it based on how close they are to creating their cocoon? Is it totally random what colour eyes they have? I'm very curious :)

A4 Art Australia Exhibition

Quick extra post as I forgot to put this in the previous one (oops!)

I have two artworks available at the A4 Art Australia exhibition which starts tomorrow. It's organised by the Contemporary Art Society of Victoria, and this year there are 178 artists involved with over 480 artworks. I won't be able to get to the opening, but hopefully will be able to visit the exhibition while it's on and get a few photos :)

All the details are below.

 

Exhibition poster

The two photos that I've entered in the A4 Art Australia exhibition. Spires and Sunset of Roses.

Friday reflection

This week I've been working on a few new projects. 

At the end of last week I painted and cut out a lot of circles for new mini cards, and spent some time sketching new mushrooms and flowers to draw on them. I'm currently taking photos of each to list on MadeIt and Etsy, which should be up early next week.

 

Coloured circles! (Finished pieces further down.)

 

Flower ideas, some for the mini cards and some I'll expand into larger artworks.

 

Mushrooms :D

Some worked, some are absolutely terrible.

This week I finished making up the mini cards, finished cutting out my kingfisher which now just needs some detail added and to be mounted/framed, started making some top hats, and prepared some wood for a few artworks I want to work on next week.

Photo from mid-week with some finished cards and some unfinished works.

More cards and part of a canvas I started.

Changes

So I renamed my blog.

I've been wanting to do some game blogging for a while, and was planning on blogging about my art and games on the same site. But I never started the game posts because it always felt weird to have them mixed together. So I've bitten the bullet and decided to keep them separate.

My art posts will be under joyphillipsartist.blogspot.com (here), where I hope to be able to focus more each week and do a few tutorials or link to tutorials I've been inspired by.
My new game blog is under my old blog name tigratho.blogspot.com which is brand new today, so bare with me while I make it look a bit prettier! I'll be doing an introduction post over there in the next day or two.

And with the breakup there will be a few small visual changes here, but nothing major. Hopefully a lot more arty posts each week though as my aim is to really focus on my art now that I've finished all my planned commission work.

February - In the Studio

During the month I've been getting a bit of exrta time to experiment with new artworks, and catch up on some I started a while ago!

 

I started experimenting with some new mini art cards, this time with watercolour. These three were the first ones and sold before I had a chance to take a finished photo (they're only half finished here!). 

 

A new experimental piece, will be handcut and mounted on black.

 

I had almost run out of mini art cards at the Summer in the Hills market last week, so here's some of the new ones made this week and ready for tomorrows Mt Evelyn Community Market.

 

Finally got these finished! With the help of my new toy - a staple gun :D

They've been almost ready for a few months, but had no hanging system on the back. Now they're ready to hang, so I just need to finish painting the room and I can put them up! 

I am looking forward to all the new works I have planned throughout March!

Orchard Swallowtail Butterfly

Earlier this week I got to take photos of an Orchard Swallowtail Butterfly. I saw it flying low around the garden, which is unusual as I've found they generally fly higher up and don't hang around in the same area for very long. After a while it laid some eggs and rested on the lemon tree. 
We'll have baby caterpillars soon!

Summer in the Hills Market

This coming Saturday I will have a stall at 'Summer in the Hills', a new market held at York On Lilydale in Mt Evelyn.

From 3pm - 8pm I will be there with many other local stalls, buskers, popup bars, food, yoga and activities for the kids.
Then from 4:30pm until about 11pm there's a concert inside (18+, tickets available via the Facebook page) with some great musicians!

The Facebook event page is at -> https://www.facebook.com/events/1795512480676438/

Come along and have some fun :D

The passing of roses

It seemed fitting with Valentine's Day coming up to take some photos of roses.
This bunch has passed its best days, but even while wilting the colours and shapes are amazing. So I had to take photos :)

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Looking forward in 2016

I can't believe it's already February!
Markets are starting up again, from this Sunday, and I'm doing three this month.

Feb 7 - Grow It, Bake It, Make It Community Market. Cnr Beaconsfield-Emerald Rd and Main St, Emerald. 10am - 3pm
Feb 20 - Summer in the Hills. York On Lilydale, Cnr York Rd and Swansea Rd, Mt Evelyn. 3pm - 8pm
aaaand
Feb 27 - Mt Evelyn Community Market. RSL Hall, 49 Birmingham Rd. 9am - 2pm

I'm currently planning some new artworks, a few with 3D features, and they'll be out later in the year :)
I've also got three exhibitions in the pipeline for the first half of the year (details coming soon!), so it's no slowing down from here in.
I will have some progress and finished photos to share with you in the coming weeks.

Walhalla day trip

Friday was the last day of our (official) holidays, so we decided to take a day trip to Walhalla.

A little bit of history: Walhalla is a bush town built because of a gold rush. It grew from people gold panning to a gold mine being built, and infrastructure to support a growing population. Then there was the BIG fire of 1888, started by a candle, which wiped out nearly every building. There's more in there (you can read everything on history signage around the town), but that's the real basics.
A lot of the buildings have been rebuilt since the fire, and it's now a tourist town, with a few shops, museums, mine tours and the train which runs on certain days across the river to the next town.

I found it amusing that at the beginning of the day I kept thinking how nice it would be to live there. It's a beautiful town in the middle of the Australian bush, but as the day went on, watching all the tourists take photos of every house (which all could be seen from every angle), I wondered how much privacy people who lived there would have. From a business point of view, it would be awesome to make art there, have an open studio, talk to new people every day. But if you were having a bad day, or weren't feeling 100%, I can see how you may not like living somewhere so exposed.

All in all, it's a gorgeous part of the world, and I definitely recommend visiting if you have the chance!

My photos suck

Early last year I went on a few photoshoots during the holidays, but came back discouraged, I felt I didn't get any good photos. And to tell you the truth, I often come back from photoshoots feeling that all my photos suck. Sure some were nice happy shots, but nothing that I feel good enough to show anyone or get printed.

The next couple of days I went through photos I'd taken over the past three years and wondered why some of them I'd kept on my computer eventhough they weren't anything special. It occured to me that maybe there is actually no such thing as a bad photo. To me, most of the photos I had taken were kinda average, nothing that made you stop and want to look at them.

But what if they weren't actually bad. What if they just weren't finished.

So I began experimenting. And a lot of the photographic artworks I produced last year, pretty much all of my abstract landscape series, were made from photos that I thought 'didn't quite cut it' originally. This year I want to continue going back through my older photos and saving the ones I would normally delete.

I thought every now and then I'd share some of the before and after pieces.
Starting with this one: Desert Portal.
The photo on the left is the original photo, taken late evening. It was a tree branch taken while taking photos of the Melbourne skyline.
The photo on the right is the finished Desert Portal artwork. I'll have its story in another post.

On a slighty related note, I've opened a shop on Society6. So you can now purchase framed, unframed and canvas prints of my artworks online!

2016!

Happy New Year!
It's been a little while since I've posted anything, quite a few things have happened, including getting married, changing my business name from Tig's Garden to trading under my new married name (Joy Phillips), and getting a puppy!

Kodak - our Golden Retreiver

I'm doing the 100 day goal with the Business Bakery again to help me towards my yearly goal. So the beginning of 2016 I will be working on getting my website up and running, adding lots of stock to my Etsy shop and working on some new 2D and 3D artworks.

Close up of a new work in progress