New prints on etsy

Hulllooo, just updated our etsy site with some new giclee prints of our Pick Me Up artworks and newly released prints of some oldies but goodies - 'Head Collapse' and 'Macho Distrust'. We're winding down our bigcartel shopfront so please go to our etsy site if you're interested in picking up some prints and original embroideries. We'll have prints of 'Aim to misbehave', 'Stay Golden' plus all the originals soon!

Prick show

Last weekend with much excitement we headed to a cactus and succulent show. A good friend has gifted us most of our cacti and succulents and got us hooked on them and we were keen to add to our collection. This was our first time going to the show though so we weren't prepared for the awesome amount of weird, spiky, hairy, bulbous specimens on display. I forgot to take the camera so these are just iPhone pics but look at those textures! We also walked around Eden Gardens which hosted the show. It's huuuge and a little overwhelming so I didn't get to look at it all properly but I spotted some lovely patterned leaves.

Twins and needles

If you're based in Australia you may have noticed a pair of similar looking faces peering at you from the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend, and that would have been us! There was a bit of a write up on us ahead of the West Elm Australian launch this week.

We designed a limited edition tote bag to help celebrate the opening of West Elm along with Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids at a custom built space in Bondi Junction. The design will be translated to a limited run of tote bags that will be given away during their grand opening. We're very excited to be involved and were over the moon when the lovely ladies at Baker asked us if we'd like to collaborate on a custom embroidery, not only because it was an exciting project but also because yay West Elm was coming to Australia. The grand opening is this Thursday. We moved house last year and i've been in major nesting mode since so this could be dangerous!

You can read the article online here

It's not always sunny, sunny side up.

Hello! We mentioned earlier that we have some new work showing at Pick Me Up London. It's on now at Somerset House and runs until this Sunday the 28th. We really recommend you go visit if you're in London. Not because of us (that would be a bit up ourselves!) but because of all the other great things happening over the three floors. There are live demonstrations and free workshops, fun stalls such as Human After All's "Face Stamp!", an 'ink-teractive' are where you have the opportunity to create your own print using stamps designed by illustrators such as Craig & Karl, Emily Forgot, Malika Favre, Jean Jullien, Supermundane and Hattie Stewart.

More details can be found at Pick Me Up. If you do go and happen to take snaps of our stall we'd love to see them and would be eternally grateful! Unfortunately we couldn't make it so have been suffering from serious FOMO seeing all the amazing pics posted on our twitter and instagram feed.

But just in case you can't get to PMU we created a mini site of the new work. Originals and giclee prints are for sale at Pick Me Up, and will be in our store after the fair wraps up. Please email us if you're interested! Pictured above is Epic Battle #3: Egg vs Baked Beans (It's not always sunny, sunny side up).

Corn Cobbed

Woooo we finished our artworks for the Pick Me Up show and have popped them in the post. Fingers crossed they make the journey to London safe and sound! Before we mailed them we took some snaps and have a sneak peek below of one of the works. It's technically not an Epic Battle but we couldn't resist including this blushing pantless Corn. I imagine he came out second best in his stoush and was pants'ed in the process.

How do you eat your corn? We like to eat ours by picking off the kernels since we hate having corn bits stuck in our teeth!

If you're on instagram we've been posting wips of some of the works there, you can find us here.

Pick Me Up

We've been busy for the last few months planning and creating some new work for Pick Me Up 2013. It's a contemporary graphic art fair held at the Somerset House in London. We've very chuffed to be part of the Selects program alongside exciting artists such as Malarky, Jean Jullien and Malika Favre (both fellow Handsome Frank'ers).

We were hoping we could go back for a visit during the fair. We could show Ava our old stomping grounds and visit with friends but unfortunately we didn't get our arses into gear fast enough so we'll be sending our work through the post with fingers and toes crossed that they arrive safe and sound.

If you're in town I hope you can go and visit. There will be workshops and I hear that the amazing Damien Florébert Cuypers will be in residence on select days to do One Minute Portraits...Dang would have loved a family portrait with M and Ava!

Here's a little sneak peek at one of the new pieces we've created. Also we've just put up a huuuuge update to our website. It's been at least half a year since we last updated so there's a lot of projects, some that couldn't fit on the home page but can be found on the separate Tactiles page.

Drifters

We went on a camping trip last week to Myall Lakes, north of Sydney and pitched our tents in a beautiful spot right between beaches and the lake. We're in the height of summer and bushfire season in Australia so we had to make do without a campfire. Luckily we had cooking facilities not to mention eco toilets so while we weren't entirely glamping we did have some home comforts (we also brought our stove top coffee maker and an air bed...) For my second camping attempt I think we did pretty well although we completely overestimated how much food we'd need and as a result have half a years worth of Spam and canned meals to go through. It was a great holiday spent with some of our closest friends (thank you G for battling gastro to make it). I hope it becomes more of a tradition and that next time we'll be able to take Ava along. Would love for her to enjoy growing up with summers swimming in the lake, climbing trees and sleeping under the stars. Below are some rock and shell textures i've been collecting over the summer. I call them drifters.. maybe that's the theme for this year? I've always liked planning and timing things. That all sort of flew out the window when Ava surprised us, maybe drifting is something I should try to embrace more, even for just a little while.

PS and just for fun some light painting photos we took on the first night..

New year freak out

Hello! New year and new blog post. I remember when I was younger the time between the end of the year and the start of the next felt a lot longer with enough time for me to get used to the idea that a new year was about to begin and be comfortable with the new starts that it would bring. Now it feels like I only have a few days to celebrate the end of the year and all things that have happened before the freak out of realising that holy moly what will I do, the new year is here and it's time to start all over again. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only person who sometimes feels overwhelmed at the possibilities of a blank page, the feeling I get at this time of year is like that just about a thousand times stronger.

At the end of last year I started to worry about how we could develop our work. My boyfriend will be the first to tell you that one of my favourite past times is to worry so I didn't turn away from these thoughts. Instead I thought about why I was feeling that way. I think it's healthy to reflect and analyse what you're doing, explore change and develop so that's what we'll be doing, starting now.

This year has the potential to be a lot of things, whether we're ready for it or not. So maybe, just like the first beach swim of the season, we just need to jump in!

1. Christmas is a lot more exciting when children are involved. I was never really into the whole Christmas build up - decorations, trees and lights until this year. I went a little decorating mad making pop pom and streamer garlands, painting ornaments, a wreath and also pimping dollar store bon bon crackers with new gifts, confetti and jokes. This is the finished wreath. I used left over acrylic paint so unfortunately it wasn't water proof and had to be taken down whenever the rains came. Next time i'll make some with waterproof paint!

2. I was in a budget saving mode this year so also hand painted some wrapping paper. 

3. We had a mixture of old ornaments for our first tree borrowed from M's parents and my own. We did splurge a little though on three owls that we hid amongst the pine needles.

4. For family Christmas lunch we continued M's family's tradition of paper hats and added some fun variations from TMod, masks too!

5. Bon bon aftermath. I replaced the novelty gifts with some amazing Japanese wooden spinning tops from Poketo, mini 3D wooden puzzles and some woven bangles from Leif that I was almost tempted to keep for myself.

7 - 10 We've been spending a lot of time at our favourite beach. Ava's slowly getting used to the open water, she loves digging her hands through the sand. Hopefully she'll take after M's side of the family and be a natural swimmer.

Happy Merry Christmas

Woah how can it already be the end of the year? I feel like the whole year has whizzed past and I was constantly trying to catch up. It feels like only last week that we were making our way back to Sydney but other moments our time in London feels like a dream. In any case this year has been full of radness, topped with the arrival of my cheeky monkey aka Ava baby aka hungry slug aka the Big Cheese.

It's been a tough but amazing year and there a lot of things to be thankful for, a lot of people that have helped us this year, given us inspiration, a kick up the but and last but not least things to smile about. I hope that this year has been good for you as well.

Thank you for coming and visiting us here on our blog. I hope that next year we're back to posting more regularly, although I know i've been saying that for a while now ;)

Here's to a lot of feasting and merry making good times!
See you next year!

ADC Young Guns X

Maricor and I were selected for this years Young Guns award which were announced earlier this month. The Young Guns is an international portfolio based award presented annually by the Art Directors Club and is open to creatives under the age of thirty. This year 34 were given and we're beyond happy to join alumni we very much admire and are inspired by such as Kyle Bean, Deanne Cheuk, Johnny Kelly and Alex Trochut to name just a few.

We weren't able to make it to the awards night that were held in New York earlier this month but our friend Matt was kind enough to snap some pics of our work on display.

Field Trip Sydney

We've mentioned it on twitter but not on our blog yet but Maricar and I will be speaking at the Sydney instalment of Field Trip this December. It's a creative conference presented by our Australian agents Jacky Winter and Australian Infront. They held the first in Melbourne earlier this year with Beci Orpin, Jeremy Ley, Tin and Ed amongst the stellar line up so we're pretty proud to be asked to speak in Sydney.

Field Trip is a little different to the usual conference, speakers are encouraged to think of it as more of a performance rather than a talk, as we'll go through the nitty gritty process of creating work, live on stage with a lot of tips shared. Both creative tips as well as technical short cuts. For Sydney there is a great variety of skills represented by the speakers: the highly respected traditional illustrator Nigel Buchanan, paper engineer Benja Harney of Paperform fame, letterist Gemma O'Brien aka Mrs Eaves, 3D digital wizards Forge & Morrow, infographics designer Anthony Calvert and the motion gurus from Flutter. Hopefully we won't be too nervous on stage but I'm slightly freaking out about the prospect of presenting in front of a big crowd. But it's a interesting format for a conference and one which we would have enjoyed going to as a student and young designer to get an insight into the creative processes of some of our creative heroes so we're glad to be involved and I hope what we have to share will be interesting.

We'll be going through a brief from start to finish, discussing the ways we tailor our work flow to working with such a labour intensive medium as embroidery. We'll share some of the digital techniques we use, but most importantly we'll be doing some live embroidery on stage.  If we have any regular visitors to the blog I hope we see you there, please say hi :)

And also if anyone wants to ask us a question about how we work please leave them in the comments section of this post and we'll try to go through them during our talk.

Field Trip Sydney takes place on the 7th of December at the Seymour Centre. Tickets are still available through Australian Infront, details are all on their site. But if you do a bit of sleuthing on the Desktop magazine website I think they're offering a reader discount!

Hope Shines Here

Earlier this year I had an incredible experience travelling with TOMS on one of their Giving trips to Peru and Guatemala visiting schools, clinics and orphanages. There is more info at the TOMS site on their One For One movement and here are some videos from the trip.

I spent a couple of days with Visualiza in Guatemala, their aim is to provide "quality eye service to everyone", their private practice helps to fund their outreach clinics and the treatments they provide to patients who are less able to afford quality ophthalmological care. I had the opportunity to see the great work they do in providing access to eye care to remote parts of the community and also to sight saving surgery. With the the support TOMS provides with its One For One movement they were able to pay for more surgeries and operate more out reach clinics.

The rest of the trip was spent in Peru helping to distribute shoes with Buckner International. We met a lot of incredible people who are there helping the community day to day. Seeing first hand the difference they make was a humbling experience. I also had the opportunity to design a mural which we painted with the help of the children in the community. The text translates to Hope Shines Here which we painted on one of the community halls Buckner has helped to establish in Lima. It was nice to be able to do something fun with the children, we all enjoyed ourselves and while we all got pretty messy and dived into the paint the mural turned out beautiful.

Photos courtesy of TOMS Shoes

Painting with thread + painting with paint

Hi it's been a while... again :( I've got to get back on track with blogging but once I missed one week then two weeks and so on it became harder to write this post. Too much to cover and I hate excessively wordy posts! So maybe if I write a list of things that we've been seeing, reading and doing Maricor and I can get back to things in more detail over the next few weeks.

Paint studies for HeyMun
We created a series of custom embroideries for our amazingly talented friend HeyMun and her new EP. HeyMun contacted us earlier this year asking if we'd be interested in working with her on her album artwork with a brief that went along the lines of do whatever inspires you. Naturally we said hell yeah and this is what we created. We were inspired by the folksy, colourful and bright sound of the track By Sea which you can listen to here.

Freelancing mothers
I wasn't sure how much baby stuff to write about on this blog since it is really meant to be about MaricorMaricar and the work that we do but I really want to share these blog posts from A Cup of Jo since they've helped me cope over the last few months of hectic work and family life. Juggling work and Ava has been pretty difficult so far, hence the very long stretches between blog posts this year so I've been almost obsessively reading blogs by other freelancing mothers to figure out how they do it. These ladies have shared their experiences and after reading their stories I feel a little better knowing that it's a juggling act that other people, not just me, struggle with and that there are ways to make it work. The first half of the posts are by mothers who work fulltime in offices, the second half are freelancing mothers who work from home. My good friend forwarded me these posts, thanks CC! -

TOMS shoes launch Sydney & Melbourne
Last week Maricor and I had a short but sweet trip to Mebourne for TOMS shoes. We painted a couple of murals for their Sydney and Melbourne launches as well as some customised shoes. We're really excited about how the murals turned out since we hardly work at that large a scale. We'll post again about the project in more detail with some pics. Thanks again to the team at TOMS for getting us on board. If you don't know about their One for One movement I highly recommend you read about it on their site. If you buy a pair of shoes they give a pair to a child in need and if you buy a pair of sunglasses they help restore sight through clinics, prescription glasses or medication. Earlier this year Maricor travelled with them on one of their many Giving trips. They travelled to Peru and Guatemala visiting schools, clinics and orphanages but more about that trip later!

We also recently talked to The Design Files and our old alma mater, you can read a bit more about our process and background here and here.  And lastly Maricor and I will be talking at the Sydney instalment of Field Trip presented by our lovely agents at Jacky Winter and the folks at Australian Infront. The conference is different to the usual format with the presenters also going through their creative process live on stage. We'll be showing some embroidery on stage, since we only have about 45min we'll have to do a little 'here's one we prepared earlier' cooking type magic. Tickets are on sale here

Some things that have happened, will happen and are happening right now

Hello! I'm not sure what it is about July/August but we've just come into a bit of a busy period with a few projects and exhibitions on. It's an exciting time and wonderful to have the security of knowing we have another job lined up beyond the current one but I wish we were able to spread these out a bit! Especially as i'm taking some maternity leave I feel a bit guilty at relying on Maricor to hold the fort.

Unfortunately we are a little late posting about the Tweet a Brief exhibition organised by Handsome Frank, our agents in the UK. As the title suggests the show asked people to tweet illustration briefs for their illustrators to create the artworks.

We chose this brief from @ejikeanyanwu 'A balloon full of multiple colours of paint, burst by a bullet, spilling onto a blank canvas. Represents creativity.' We've explored water colour gradients in our work before but have wanted to experiment more with thick paint textures and splatters so had a lot of fun with this brief. Below is our response to the brief and if you follow this link Handsome Frank have posted up the exhibition in it's entirety on their blog.

Maricor posted earlier about the True Self exhibition co presented by our Australian agents Jacky Winter and MGPO. We had a lot of fun collaborating on our two boards - the first with Limedrop and the second with Thom Kerr, and to be in an amazing group show with other talented folk such as Matt Huynh, Beci Orpin and We Buy Your Kids. The entire show is up online which is great since we also missed out on seeing it down in Melbourne.

We also had the chance to be a part of a group show down at He Made She Made gallery in Sydney which opened last night. 'Who Shot the Serif' focuses on type on and off the page and brought together another group of designers that got us excited, WBYK, Luke Lucas, Thi Nguyen, Wing Lau plus a whole lot more. Our original Go Play, Kylie type and B&E are on display, the show will run for 5 weeks. You might see us down there, I have to go back and have a closer look at the work, the opening was pretty chockers and I could't get close enough to the works to take in the details!

And to round off what's become a monster of a post is another group show we'll be part of in Melbourne at Brunswick Street Gallery. Needle Work Needle Play will showcase contemporary Australian artists and illustrators who have used embroidery in their work. We are very excited to be part of this show and can't wait to see what the other artists have created. Carly who invited us to take part has done an amazing job organising the show and has even created a blog to document the lead up to the show and has profiled each of the artists. Some of the artists have shown some sneak peaks of work in progress, it's all looking great, here is Cat Rabbit's blog post on her piece. Another shame that we won't be down in Melbourne to check it out!

A little girl called Ava Esme

Hey there! First of all i'd like to say sorry for the blog silence, I had actually started this post almost a month ago but life things got in the way - happy life things though. It's been a bit hectic hereabouts because Michael and I welcomed our little girl Ava Esme! She was born on the 2nd, early in the morning and since then we've been getting to know her little grunts and sleepy smiles and trying to decipher her different cries. It's been a tiring past few weeks but we've had the most wonderful support from both our families which we're both very grateful for. 


So yep that's what caused the temporary blog freeze and I was almost done writing that last one before, go figure! The post explained what prompted us to organise the poster giveaway we had last month - which was that we were on such a high from being blogged on several awesome blogs and say a massive thank you for those lovely write ups.

Since starting our embroidered graphics we've often worried that maybe what we were doing was a little kitsch or a bit sickly cute to be taken seriously. So being featured on design and art blogs that we greatly admire and follow has been a wonderful surprise (we may also have indulged in a few jumping geeky high fives). Thank you Juxtapoz, Fox is Black, It's Nice That, Australian INfront and Oh Joy!


PS Ava turned one month today. Time goes by so quickly!

Giveaway Update

Hello! We've drawn the winner of the poster giveaway, congratulations Ramon Lo we hope you enjoy the prints! We'll be in touch soon for your postage details.

Maricor and I would like to thank everyone who entered and got in touch. We had such a thrill organising this one hopefully we can host another one soon! :)

Giveaway

[UPDATE] Thanks to everyone who entered, the giveaway is now over. Congratulations to Ramon Lo who will be receiving these prints in the mail soon!


We've had such a great response to our giveaway, thanks everyone! There's still one day to enter, just a reminder to remember to include your email in your comments if you don't have a full profile as we won't be able to get in touch with you if you win and unfortunately if we can't contact you we'll have to pick another name out of a hat. Could Choi, Kristin and Nuri who left comments below please get in touch via email as we're unable to view your contact email on your profiles. Thanks!! If you prefer not to share your details in the comments that's cool, just email us your entry at hi@maricormaricar.com.


We've had so many lovely comments and posts about our work this week that we'd love to give a little something back with a MaricorMaricar giveaway. We have a "Back to Oz" giclee print, "Diamonds on the soles of her feet" risograph, "Leche" risograph and "Enradado" risograph to send out to someone. All you need to do is email us at hi@maricormaricar.com or comment on this post (just with your email or somehow for us to get in touch with you if you win) or tweet us back and we'll draw one name on midday Tuesday the 29th May (Sydney time).

1. Back to Oz A4 giclee print
2. Detail of Back to Oz
3. Diamonds on the soles of her feet A3 risograph
4. Leche A4 risograph
5. Enredado A4 risograph

* Sorry, just have to mention we moderate comments so please don't worry if your comment doesn't appear straight away. And this is open to overseas readers!

As Prescribed - Fine Lines

As Prescribed is an artist driven t-shirt label that aims to be a platform for exposing artists and designers to the universe. Founded by Melbourne based illustrator Eveline Tarunadjaja and designer Nick Parker, As Prescribed takes on the form of an art gallery, in an online retail environment.  The awesome folks behind new T-shirt label As Prescribed invited MaricorMaricar to take part in their first artist series "Fine Lines". The series of shirts also feature designs by Eveline Tarunadjaja, Sean Morris and Kubota Fumikazu.

The label launched last week with a pop up shop and exhibition at No Vacancy gallery in Melbourne. Head down and say hello to Eveline, she's super nice and until the 20th of May visitors to the gallery get $10 off shirts.

Our piece is titled "The Hungry Slug" and this little monster and some of his gang are currently on display in the exhibition as well as a couple of original hand sewn embroideries and our print "Makers, Dreamers" which is available for sale during the exhibition.

Each artist has a nice little interview up on the As Prescribed site, here's our one, we were pretty nervous on camera and kept pulling faces!