more drawing! i was hunched over my lightbox on wednesday, drawing a bowl of soupy noodles, when the bell on my inbox went. it was the editor of pan magazine, asking me how the illo was coming along. spooky.

(well, perhaps not so spooky: i was quite late.)

have you bought yourself a pan yet? apparently it is going so swimmingly that a reprint of issue one is scheduled in the coming weeks. i filed my copy for my second column a couple of weeks ago, and it was a vote of confidence when the editor wrote back and asked for an illustration to go with.

i don’t expect issue two to be out for some months yet, but that there’s a taster for ya.

then yesterday, i was persuaded to make a short film for two ply, the annual low-fi film festival held in the loungeroom of a house just at the top of my street. fancy: a salon, in the heart of the upper-middle-inner-west. this year, the theme was “tongue”, and there i was, with no paid work to sully my schedule. the only downside was that two ply was a mere day away.

after dropping the kid off at school, i scrambled myself an idea, and drew a few things with a 6B pencil. i don’t know if it’s conventional, but i put it all together in photoshop, exported several hundred jpgs into quicktime, saved them into 11 separate clips, and then stumbled my way through the edit, all the while googling stuff like “how to lengthen transitions in imovie”.

(which is not possible?)

anyway. 10 hours later…

i premiered “sugar shanty” a few hours ago, to warm applause and kind comments, and despite listening to the same 40 second segment of the song over and over and over again, i am completely not sick of it. in fact, i can’t get it out of my head. rum tara tra la la la la!

but we haven’t been making a habit of sailing off to bedtime on a big maudlin cloud, no. for example, mere pages before charlotte was dispatched, we read of templeton’s all-night bender, eating discarded fairground food. there was an illustration on the page: a line drawing of the corpulent rodent.

“he looks like matt preston,” the kid said.

“rat preston!” i countered.

oh, how we laughed.

ah, life after masterchef. what to do with the extra six or however-many-hours-it-was per week? i must be finding something worthy on which to fritter it away, because i have absolutely nothing to show for it.

the kid, on the other hand, assures me that she will be participating in junior masterchef as soon as she is able. so we shall spend the next two years in training. i set her dicing bacon, and then slicing olives, and not three olives in she had sent the knife into her finger, and was whimpering in a most pitiful manner. she spent the rest of dinner prep curled up on the couch, finger aloft, watching “snow white”.

she had really been counting on callum winning, and in the week before the masterchef final, had prepared this drawing celebrating his victory. judging from the masterchef logo on her shirt, i think she had projected herself into this reality too. in this reality, i wear tiaras and long slinky gowns, and my hair goes down to my feet.

ahhh… disappointment on all counts.

ok, fine. we watch “masterchef“. even though i hate the clunky musical cues, the repetitive editing, the explanations and narrations by the contestants even as the very events unfold right before our eyes… the kid does not really mind — she usually gives her own running commentary over the top of the soundtrack anyway, though the appearance of the burning m logo and the cut to ad break at dramatic points sends her into conniptions.

last year, we went through a stage of playacting “masterchef”: i’d serve up breakfast, and she’d say, “now tell me, poh, how did you make this jam toast and hot chocolate?”

“well, first i got a piece of bread…”

this year, she has been documenting the action with the occasional masterchef drawing. here you see the judging of the recent onsite afternoon-tea challenge. we were very impressed with callum’s crown jewels rendered in the medium of macaron. so were the judges. WAW!*

*pronounced: WOW!

so yeah, in case you thought i was still slumming it in london, i’m back at home, sinking slowly into a bunch of projects — none of them horrible, yay — and the mundanity of doing the dishes, and the absolute futility of vacuuming.

one thing i’m chuffed about though, is that any day now, well ok, maybe a month from now, and hopefully not two months from now, the inaugural issue of PAN magazine will hit the streets, and the food columnist will be me.

here’s how the magazine tells it:

PAN is a new independent magazine for makers, designers, writers, musicians, artists and thinkers. combining the best elements of a literary magazine with arts, culture, fashion, literature and music content PAN magazine aims to engage with culture in a way that’s meaningful, edgy and entertaining. we won’t be running features on how to pluck your eyebrows but we will be thinking about transhumanism, heteroflexibility, emerging artists, producers and musicians.

for now it’s out twice a year, and they’re currently seeking submissions of stories or essays or, yes, poetry for issue #2. interested?

maybe you might even pre-order a copy of issue #1.

it’s not quite like helen’s time out magazine coup, but you’ll get me telling you maudlin stories of my encounters with hot chips. and this drawing i made for it? it’s running so big that the chips are larger than life-sized. well, i’m excited.

meanwhile, a week and a half ago, the kid took out first prize in the school fete craft competition. nice job, kid!

i made a drawing a couple of weeks ago. did some picture research on the internet, sketched a rough on paper, redrew all the components in a loose and scribbly fashion on the back of some official letter i’d been sent, scanned them in, then pieced it all together in photoshop. i was pleased that day to finally figure out how to drop colour into a tonal greyscale drawing, without the colour layer obscuring or compromising the pencilled outlines.

layers > multiply

that’s all it took. for years i’d wondered. i sent it off then, to where it was needed, and not an hour later, received a two-word reply: oooooh! beautiful! how warm and shiny i felt.

the kid works much quicker. she takes a sheet from my tray of one-sided printouts, and draws directly in any shade of felt-tipped marker. a few days ago she grabbed the nearest biro and made my new favourite drawing: a joyous supermarket excursion with a cat, a mouse, and a family of tiny kittens. it really sums up the happiness i feel when i’m at the supermarket.

(though not the bit where i stand in a queue for 20 minutes because my woolies refuses to put more cashiers on, grumble, gnash.)

something else that makes me happy is the super speedy three day sydney zine from dawn at handmadelove, full of drawings of smiley food to eat around sydney (in three days, oh the pressure!). just look at the lovely watercolouring, and the cheery lettering. here’s one of my favourite cafes, badde manors, #3 in glebe. it’s true: they do have a way with potatoes.

[ picture from handmadelove ]

sometimes the kid gets all excited about going to the supermarket. because she cannot yet write most cohesive words, she will draw our shopping list. today we are going to chinatown.

clockwise from top: soy milk, noodles, rose syrup cordial, nanami togarashi, dumplings, chili bean paste, sesame oil.

- – -
this was originally posted to the ragingyoghurt facebook page,
while the blog lay dormant.

wow. the time sure goes by.

and it’s not that i’ve got nothing to say. in fact, my camera is full to the brim of past eatings, and my head is soft with trying to figure out how to tell you about those slivers of chocolate with a saltwash on the underside.

!

i’ve completed my last session of comic artist rehab, a milestone of mixed emotions because i feel generally good about this handful of strips and the potential to keep going in this direction… but now that the deadlines are done with, i know i just won’t get any more comics drawn for a while. finishing up rehab means a freed-up pocket of time that i can squander away on the internet once more, with no regrets.

which will be good for the blog i suppose. um. though not right at this moment.

you come, day after day, and hope that i might have written about a cake or a soup or something. and instead, this chasm of disappointment keeps getting bigger. i’m sorry, and it’s not just that i have all this work to do. in fact, i do have a lot of work to do, all overdue now as of four days ago, and i’m doing my best to procrastinate, and i think i’m doing that quite well. but, so you see, i could well be using this stolen time to blog.

instead you get a painful memory about cake gone wrong. how’s that for chasm of disappointment? eh?

rehab is going swimmingly….

the kid has not been playing fair of late. dropping of naptime aside, the deal is that i take her out to fun places and buy her treats, and in return she is sweet and docile and generally nice. i’m even happy, in principle, for her to set the itinerary. playground? cafe? that shop over there full of fun kitchen things? yup! these days she wakes up in the morning, and her first words are, “where are we going?”. really.

however, on recent excursions, she has been cheery only up until the part where i gaze across at something that might solely interest me. at this point, she will become most floppy and whiney, and she will say things about wanting to go outside now. there may even be grunting!

i know it’s all part of growing her own personality, but bloody hell it’s getting tedious. this afternoon, after a bus ride back from the city, she chose going to the newsagent with me rather than following her dad home. the newsagent by the busstop has decreed every saturday and sunday, “magazine day”; all magazines are 20% off. this is almost as good as a national public holiday to me. as soon as i flipped open the cover of “vogue”, the kid ran up the aisle and said that she had to go to the toilet right away.

i was extremely furious. extreme furiousity! this entailed grabbing her hand, and walking super fast across the street, past the church, down the hill, only pausing a moment when she stumbled, and not at all when the loosely-knotted balloon string came away from her wrist and drifted off into the blue with her bright pink xmas balloon. we had been to the david jones xmas concert in hyde park earlier in the day, a travesty of shrek in a santa suit.

but there was no jolly hoho left. there were tears (hers) and slamming of doors (mine). and after her dad took over and wiped her bottom and read her a book and put her to bed, he said that maybe i could go out and play by myself tomorrow. he went out himself then, to the beach and a barbeque and a night off, and the kid slept for three hours until i roused her. she was a different child then, sweet, docile and generally nice.

i don’t get too much work done these days. i don’t seem to get much of anything done, actually, except keeping the kid entertained. the two or three hours after she goes to bed for the night… i am torn between work, and this blog, and comic artists rehab. and on nights like this one, when the sofa upstairs is vacant, there is also “gilmore girls” to contend with. who’s winning tonight? not work. blog — well, i could write another post, but i won’t. i posted a comic today, so i won’t have to again until wednesday. so.

hey, did you know gingerbread frappucini are back in season? i think it would be the perfect accompaniment to the biscuit factory exhibition. only a day away…