Now selling...

It's taken me about forever to get up to speed on this, but I've just set up my online store here. I'm pretty excited and totally new at the whole thing, so bear with me. The above is the first print to go, she's one of my favourites... available here.

Desert island...

Spell Spring Summer 12/13 

Photography: Johnny Abegg
Model: Matilda Price
Art direction and styling: Isabella and Elizabeth Briedis of Spell
Hair and makeup: Luciana Briedis

Sometimes -- when I'm falling asleep or driving a really familiar road or sitting on the train in the morning -- I daydream about the endless list of projects I'd love to get started on. Not the least of which has always been silversmithing, and so that leads to thinking about what I'd put into the perfect jewellery collection. 

It goes a bit like this: raw and metal-cast quartz, brass and silver, somehow incorporate some heavy, decorative linework etched into primal warrior plating... and other aesthetic things I like -- maybe some cacti, a hint of the desert and the rays of a rising sun, scarab/thunderbird-esque spread wings, feathers, bones, leather, turquoise, dusty boots... 

But, with no hope of me learning to work metal anytime soon, it's a spectacular-good-thing that Spell and the Gypsy Collective is out there doing the hard yards for daydreamers like me. And when I saw this ring, I was floored -- how did they come up with something so perfect? It's exactly all the things I'd love to put together in a ring, but wouldn't have the first idea about how to tie them all together. 

So, quite obviously, I'm just excited about the whole thing. Naturally, in response to my excitement, I drew a picture (and used the dodgy scanner -- sorry about the image quality). 

And here we are.

Each the other's world entire

Still more totem thoughts. 

I've been up to quite a few things that I can't wait to share. But for now... you'll have to settle for my distracted Photoshop fidgeting.

Bleached I & II

Welcoming summer in the southern hemisphere... nearly...

Suburban secret garden

Harley Davidson boots via Ebay; op shop shirt; Edge of Urge Junkie leggings; op shop glasses; market/pawnshop rings. 

 It's nice living in a new-ish place. I was sad when I left my last home, because we had all the good places on lock, and I wasn't scared of driving in the city anymore. Now we're working on figuring all that out again, which means exploring and making some awesome discoveries... Not limited to the manmade kind. S

o Bay and I were pretty impressed when we found this prickly pear patch down the road from our house, on an empty riverside block. We even took a piece of it home with us, to transplant. 

 As for the get up, this may serve as photographic evidence of the last hurrah of my favourite shirt. I found it in an op-shop in the valley and, for the second half of it's life, I've worn it to absolute, undeniable, unavoidable death. Which just makes the super-comfy, super-bright Edge of Urge leggings look all the more fresh...

Sunbleach

All about curls, freckles, long moonlit nights and the start of the Australian summer.

And slightly dodgy tattoos, as usual.

I'll post some actual scans of my sketchbook soon, not just dodgy Instagram pics.

Tonic of Wildness

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

I love that Sugarhigh + Lovestoned have accompanied their latest shoot with such a beautiful quote and notion... It's the kind of thought that feeds into my artwork, and that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

And, when you top it off with some beautiful images, I just want to go back to the farm and think about it for a while.

Sugarhigh and Lovestoned

Model: Sequoia Annamarie Nelson
Photograhper: J.R. Furbush
Make up: Lauren Reed
Styling: Tovah Olmo of Spring Fever Vintage + Sequoia

via Sugarhigh + Lovestoned

Summons

Girl of the Golden West

I love the feeling of discovering something -- a new artist, a fresh set of photos, a heart-sinkingly rad piece of clothing -- and just thinking, there is so much remarkable, creative action going on out there, and we live in fortunate, crazy times; to be able to see it, as it's breaking and happening, even if it is halfway across the globe.

And damn, did I get that feeling when I saw this collab piece between Spanish Moss and Oracle Fox, for American Gold's SS13 -- Girl of the Golden West. Of course, the photography, editing and the clothing itself are beautiful too, but I'm just head over heels with that first image.
And now, of course, I want daisy-print everything.

Sunday morning, coming down

I'm reading a biography about Jimi Hendrix at the moment. So I very much feel like the world ought to be upholstered in velvet, tasseled suede, gold embroidery, beads -- it should be over-saturated with far-out-acid-sparkles of colour, light and tiny mirrors -- we should be out under an expansive, three-quarters-drunk sky, building all kinds of mystical Spanish castles or golden winged ships, weaving flowers or creating something. 

And then also (to draw on a quite opposite cultural reference), like George Costanza, I would drape myself in velvet -- all day, every day -- if it were socially acceptable.

So, with both George and Jimi in mind, there's a strong argument for why I love Tunnelvision's new lookbook Sunday morning, coming down -- velvet, embroidery and embellishments, tassels and rich, deep colours. Maybe the aftermath of some late-night-early-morning debauchery, drinking and jamming with the ghosts of Jimi, Janis and Jim...

And also, the two ladies who run the show at Tunnelvision -- Madeline and Brit -- seem like the kind of chicks who it would be fun to spin some tales over a bottle of whiskey with, and who also use their online voices to push for something a bit more meaningful than directing readers toward the next thing to consume.

Strange lands

This dress is probably the best thing I've ever purchased from an op-shop. 

I'm still deciding how I feel about that wallpaper though.

Thanks for being rad

Thanks for being rad.
Supportive. For stopping by, and checking out what I do. For digging it.
It's really encouraging, especially when I spend a lot of my time by myself, looking at things and thinking:
"What the hell? This sucks. I'm quitting directly."
Anyway, I appreciate all the support and kind words incredibly, even though I'm mostly a bit reply-challenged when it comes to social media.
Thanks,
Dig xx

Home from home

Wow. The last four days just flashed by, but I wish they could have dragged on.

And yet, here I am -- back at my desk on an overcast Melbourne Monday morning, daydreaming about the farm: swimming, fishing, beer-drinking and canoeing in the cool, freshwater river (which I didn't even get the chance to swim in this time), dusk-time drinks in the back garden with my family, fairy lights and pups, standing on the cool verandahs and looking out at the midday heat, sandwiches with fresh-cut ham and homemade pickles for lunch, rainwater that tastes like water should, even though it's stained a little with eucalypt leaves... Ah well, next time.

Anyway, the reason I was at the farm was that my sister had the most beautiful wedding. Hopefully I'll be able to share some photos of it on here soon. It was so perfectly put together (not to mention photogenic) and truly represented her and her husband... but it was all over too quickly!

So for now, it's back on the mousewheel...

Somedays...

Just a quick little piece of type/cactus bloom...
Loosely based on that Hunter S Thompson quote: "On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need."

One in five

Bits and pieces from the last few weeks via Instagram (@raychponygold)... I'm about to go into illustration-worker mode and make good on some promises, so I might just disappear for a while.

Also, my sister's wedding is on the horizon (a week-and-a-half!), so I'm looking forward to going home and seeing my family. 

Mum called the other night to tell me she's put an antechinus skeleton in a bird cage so the bugs can clean it off without other animals taking it away... unique behaviour there.

Mother totem

God. It took me two days to finish this (that includes a lot of procrastinating, namely lying in the sun reading a Jimi Hendrix autobiography and drinking tea).

Every time I start out drawing a waratah, I'm reminded why I never draw them. They're excruciating. And this is only the third time I've tried to draw one. 

But, this is for my mum, and she digs waratahs and regent bowerbirds, so. 

I'm not sure how she's going to feel about the wallaby skull (she's not big on "dark" themes)... but it is a nod to our ongoing argument about who gets to keep the animal bones my dad is always finding.

So here it is. Mother totem.

Strange totems II

More strange totems... Finished and in the works.

Nope.

Why -- after a whole weekend of staring at a blank page, thinking, "I can't think of anything to draw," and "I ain't got shit to do," -- do I wake up on Monday morning and think of about seven different things I'd like to draw and at least three other projects I promised people I'd start on?

And at 5am, no less. 

It's going to be a long week.

Rising sorrows

Mara Hoffman.

Strange Totems

Strange Totems II (flight)

This is the first one of (hopefully) a series.