You can't win em all

A big thank you to everyone who took the time to vote for us in the Suncorp Helping Hand peoples choice. Unfortunately we didn't get the prize but we appreciate every vote that was made.
Speaking of winners, last night I took some photos of some of the boys in town painting. These guys are part if a community group I have been working with designed to encourage young graffiti artists to paint responsibly. The sessions include mentoring by local artists, workshops and field trips.

Last week a sketching comp was held and the winners got to paint on the workshop walls. Getting to see these guys in action was so rewarding as I usually only see them from the other side of the counter when they come with their parents to buy paint.

I have often pondered the role of graffiti in our town and take seriously the social responsibility of selling paints designed for this style of art, particularly in a town that takes such a negative view of the art form. I have even recently teased our Mayor for being an 'old fuddy-duddy' for being anti-graffito ( he then fessed up to being secretly keen on a bit of stencil work) because at the end of the day, as an artist and gallery owner I'm excited to see our community expressing itself through the medium of painting!

I have tried painting via spray can and it's very, very hard... Even for an artist with my experience, so to see young people so engaged and proficient in their artwork was very inspiring.
Congrats guys and keep up the good work!

X Steph

DIY - Instagram Print

I'm so excited about the up-coming 'Click @Red Brick' exhibition, I love group shows for their diversity of work and fun opening celebrations. This show combines another passion of mine and that's photography. I snap away at every opportunity and love sharing my images too. We are still accepting entries for this show so hop onto our website for an application form. 

We are embracing all forms of photography, lomo, polaroid, iphonography, you name it... we want it! Recently we acquired two large light-boxes and I have a vision of a whole grid of small un-framed images would look amazing on them.
This reminded me of a fun project I did to pretty up my hallway recently. I received a few questions about them so here is a little tutorial. It's pretty simple and is a great way to display those cute family pics.

I used my Instagram photos for this project, I love the size and scale of Polaroid prints so decided to print my images to this size. Using Adobe Photoshop I made a new image 10 x 15cm (the size of my photo-paper). I regularly back-up my photos from my iphone onto my laptop so I then opened the image file, dragged it onto the blank canvas. Using 'free transform' I adjusted the image to Polaroid dimensions (7 x 7.9 cm).

 

I then printed the image on my ink-jet printer... it's nothing flash but does a pretty good job if I print at high quality. I could trim the paper at this point but I actually like how the image is framed with space to write a caption underneath!

 I am constantly adding to this little grid in my hallway with images of friends, my lovely Mr and reminders of great adventures. I can't wait until it fills the whole space!

X Steph