23 May 2011

Graffiti

I've just come back from an amazing trip around some European cities I've never visited before. My boyfriend and I decided we needed a break as it's been a tough couple of months, so we scraped our savings together and booked our train tickets to take us to Paris, Berlin and Prague (very low carbon footprint by the way and a great way to see the beautiful landscapes). We saw so much it hasn't really sunk in yet - it was a scenery, architecture and history overload!








Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my favourite graffiti from our travels. I'm like a geeky graffiti-spotter - I just need an anorak and a notepad. Maybe I should start up a new blog 'Graffiti from around the world'? Someone's already done it I'm sure, and I couldn't afford to travel about all the time anyway!
The pictures above are all from Montmartre, Paris. Below are some from Oranienstrasse in Berlin.
















I love the image of the dog with wings - I want my own srcappy looking mutt with wings and stars on his side! Failing that, I would settle for a cat that poops glitter.


And last but certainly not least a piece of the Berlin Wall. We went to Checkpoint Charlie and the museum there. It was so moving to see how people were separated by the politics of the period and still attempted to cross the border despite the risks. Berlin has placed a brick path which crosses pavements and roads showing where the wall used to stand. It really hits home when you see just how Berlin was carved up and how the people suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of the wall.


22 Apr 2011

Folksy Friday

Okay, so I know it's a bit late but here's my first Folksy Friday! :) I chose these items ageeeeeees ago, but have been in the kitchen making brownies and lamb curry, and watching Indiana Jones (love this film!) so have only just got around to uploading it. Slackity slack slack! :)

Here are my favourite little bits of awesome oddness from Folksy this week! I'm a big fan of Little Black Heart and her monster cards are so cool!

Lemur Lady's Awesome Emporium (awesome name) makes some gorgeous bags and cushions, my fave being the one with the skulls (naturally!).

I've also found a new shop which looks pretty cool - Sock 'n' Soul - loving the DJ doll! Amazing packaging too, looks just like the packaging I get with some of my vinyl figurines. Kudos for the attention to detail there, Deviant Panda likes this :)


Lemur Lady's Awesome Emporium 1 Little Black Heart
Uniquely Different Janine Basil
Nitemare Designs Sock 'n' Soul


Uniquely Different's bag is just gorgeous (I overuse this word sometimes I know, but I sincerely mean it every time!!!) I've a big big fan of this bag and my boyfriend has just promised to buy it for me for my birthday (It's on the 5th of May so I hope I won't be too late!) so follow the link and look at the OTHER bags pretty please, but leave this one for me! :)

What can I say about the Doki Doki headband from Janine Basil? - the woman makes good headwear, and this is a factoid :)

And last but not least I had to include the amazing illustration by Nitemare Designs - I love this style, it reminds me of Junko Mizuno of whom I am a big fan :)

Enjoy and have a lovely Easter weekend!

DP xxx

11 Apr 2011

The Panda's back with some little monsters!

Hello hello,

It's been a little while huh? I've been pretty busy lately dealing with non-Deviant Panda issues so I haven't had time to make anything new for a while, but all that is coming to an end now and I'm itching to get Panda-ing again! :) Got lots of ideas, lots of shiny new supplies, and in a week's time I'll have alot of free time on my hands! I finish my day job on 15th April (now long now!!) so I'll be a lady of luxury soon. I get a payout from work too so I have some capital behind me so I'll be making some tough decisions soon, like whether or not to push my jewellery as a full-time occupation or whether to supliment my income with a part-time job, hmmm....anyways, lots to think about! :)

I've booked myself and my OH a holiday first though - we need it after the last couple of months! - We'll be travelling to Paris then to Prague, before staying in Berlin and then back to Paris. We are both very, very excited and it'll be our first foreign holiday together. I will be shutting the shops while I'm away (30th April - 14th May) so if you need something now get in there quick! ;)

Oh yeah, did I mention shops? Yes, I think I did! That's because I'm not just on Folksy now but Etsy too! I thought it was about time to start expanding so I'd like to say hello and welcome to all International friends and fans. I've put a little link to the side which you can click on to go to Etsy, or just click here:
Deviant Panda on Etsy

Whilst setting up I took the opportunity to have a look around and oh my goodness gracious, there is such a wealth of talent!! I made a treasury (I love this feature, I could make lists of pretty things all day!) going with a theme of little monsters. I love wierd little dolls, pictures and things that you sometimes just can't catagorise! Looking around the many wierd and wonderful things on offer at Etsy I had to put my favourites into a list and I'd to share it with you here! If you like Deviant Panda's you will love these! :) Enjoy!

'Little Monsters!' by DeviantPanda

Deviant Panda likes monsters. Little furry ones, Big slimy ones, and everything in between! Look at these gorgeous monsters in all their wierd and wonderful glory!

























Necklace Brain Mons...


$12.00

Monty the baby blue...


$38.00

Big Pink Monster an...


$16.00

Yeti Monster


$7.50

Monster Tea Party F...


$15.00

Felt DiDi Doll - He...


$13.00

Fleece Felt Handmad...


$25.00

Doug the brown mons...


$38.00

Mound of Monsters -...


$50.00

Paul the mini monst...


$20.00

Fuzzy monster trio ...


$20.00

Cute monsters godzi...


$3.00

Pirate Monster Bulw...


$8.00

two green monsters....


$30.00

Monster Giclee Prin...


$23.00

Zombie Cake Toppers...


$45.00



Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

6 Feb 2011

The Panda Is Still Alive!

yup, yup, yup - I'm still here, been pretty quiet of late on the ol' blogging, tweeting, facebooking, folksying, shouting-from-the-hilltops front, but my regular boring life has reared it's ugly head and gotten in the way of the cool and interesting part of my life. I work in the public sector to pay the bills and guess what? Spending cuts are a-coming, happy days! Well actually, spending cuts have been snipping the joy out of work for the last year or so, but just before Christmas it was announced that 450 jobs would have to go (great timing powers-that-be, just in time for the festive season). So we were all asked if we would like to leave in a 'voluntary' exit scheme and given 2 weeks to mull up the pros and cons of impending unemployment. deep joy.

After a LOT of uhming and ahing I applied for the initial 'application sifting, procrastinating' stage (this is the civil service after all) thinking "what the hell, it'll give me more time to make a decision because I'm rubbish at making important decisions about my future". And then, I got through the application process! Thanks department heads, it's good to know that nearly 4 years of hard graft, and smiling through gritted teeth at every shocking management decision was for nothing after all, am clearly not worth keeping, hmmmm. So now me and my OH are planning for the future, I'm waiting for a final 'compensation/redundancy-but-not-actual-redundancy' offer to be made (just gimme the effing money 'kay?) and I am outta there! Goodbye time recording, goodbye case work, goodbye flex time, goodbye efficiency savings, goodbye IT system which isn't fit for purpose, goodbye mid-year reviews, goodbye lovely colleagues, goodbye monthly team meetings, goodbye technical manual, goodbye O.R. Norwich!

Still, me and a mate/colleague who is in the same position have joked that when the office decides to recruit temps (when they realise they don't have enough staff to do the work) we'll be first in line! :)

So all in all this is why I've been so quiet - got alot on my plate trying to figure out the next stage of my life, figure out what it is that I ACTUALLY want to do as a full time job and planning a holiday for me and my OH (who incidentally works at the same office but has decided not to leave so that we have a stable wage coming in, GODBLESSHIM) for after I actually leave my job in April/May. Ideas for Deviant Panda come up now and again and get scribbled down ready for my triumphant return to the cool and interesting part of my life, but for now I'm concentrating on me and mine. :)

The shop is still open (I can still cope with putting stuff into envelopes and going down the post office!) but new stuff may have to wait for now!

Take care you gorgeous guys and gals, see you on the flipside!

Kate xxx

12 Dec 2010

Latest Commision...

As well as the jewellery I make for Deviant Panda I also take on commissions. My latest commission was a charm bracelet for a Christmas present. The brief was to create a charm bracelet with a Chinese influence incorporating the Chinese Zodiac symbol of the monkey.

I started by painting wooden beads with a black base with red Chinese lettering on top representing the words Happy, Joy, Love, Luck, Money and 'Have Fun'. I painted two more wooden beads with a black base followed by small flowers on one and gold and red trellis on the other. I varnished them all with a glossy varnish and threaded them onto silver wire finishing with red glass cubes and jade effect beads.
Then I upcycled some charms I had from an old bracelet I was given years ago and created a new charm from a Chinese coin I obtained from a trip to China earlier this year.

The last task was create a jade effect monkey charm so using a mixture of greens, white, black and translucent polymer clay I set to work creating jade. This was something I have never tried before but I loosely followed the instructions given in Donna Kato's The Art of Polymer Clay until I managed to get a consistency I was happy with. I flattened the blob of clay and started to carve out the basic shape of the monkey, continuing to sculpt the finer details. Once I was happy with the monkey I added some detailing, said a quick prayer and popped it in the oven. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome which goes to show that following a recipe seems to pay off! :) I varnished the monkey once it had cooled, attached all the charms to the bracelet and proudly presented it to my very happy customer.

I'm always happy to take on commissions so if you have something in mind just get in touch either via folksy, facebook or twitter (the links to my sites are all around the page) or leave a comment for me on this blog. I hoped you liked the pictures of the bracelet as much as I enjoyed creating it! :)
Til next time,
DP

3 Dec 2010

Sugar Skulls and other inspirations... pt 2

I have recently found some time on my hands (at last) to write the concluding part of my inspirations for my Dia de los Meurtos Collection. This has come at a price as I have a nasty little ulcer on my right cornea, a result of a speck of dirt wriggling it's way under my contact lens and becoming rather bothersome. A trip to A&E and 2 types of eye drops should hopefully clear the little bugger up soon. I wear contacts for vanity reasons and vanity, my friends, always seems to come at a price. So between hourly eye drops and several breaks away from the screen (my eye still isn't quite up to staring at a computer screen for hours on end just yet) here we go...

Since I was very small I remember being enthralled by manga and anime. I remember a trip to Brittany when I was about 5 where I was first introduced to anime by way of a french-dubbed cartoon. I couldn't tell you want the cartoon was but the style of drawing was something that I'd never seen before and I was fascinated by it.


Skip forward 6 years and to a slumber party at my best friends house where her older brother introduced me to Akira, a groundbreaking film which pulled anime over into the western mainstream. From that moment on I was obsessed. As a teenager growing up in London I would take myself off to Chinatown to buy Hello Kitty keyrings (this was before it was widely available in every high street shop on everything from bubblegum to children's underwear) and My Melody stationery. I still have some of those original purchases with their original Japanese packaging!


I'd go to Forbidden Planet to buy Sailor Moon and Urusei Yatsura manga. I loved Chibi Moon and the kawaii-ness of it all. Whilst at university I even wrote my dissertation on the shift of influence between the East and West focusing on anime and manga to argue my point. Let's just say that some of my predictions from 2002 have materialised, you can call me Pythia if you like! :)

As a result of being a fully paid up fangirl from an early age these influences have crept into my work. I've always leaned more towards the abstract but in the last few years I have become more and more influenced by Japanese art and design. One of my big inspirations is vinyl figures - designer toys if you will. One of my favorite books on the subject is Full Vinyl by Ivan Vartanian, a look at the history of the vinyl toy phenomenon featuring some of the most exciting pieces of subversive toy culture. One of my favorite designers is Junko Mizuno (her manga are pretty cool too) although KAWS is a pretty big influence as well.




Another recommended read is RackGaki - Japanese Graffiti by Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan. I am a big fan of Esow, Sasu and Tenga featured in this book.








I don't know what it is exactly that I love about all of these designers, artists and images. As a visual person I find it hard to describe exactly what bit I like and where in my work you can see the influence. Instead I'd rather give you the starting points and images to look at and make up your own minds.


Although this is focused at trying to explain the influences behind the Dia de los Muertos collection to be honest these influences will stay with me in all my work, I love them too much to abandon them in pursuit of the next big thing. So expect more tales of weird toys and pretty graphics to feature as time goes by!


Until the next time, sayonara!


DP

29 Oct 2010

Something for the weekend...

Well it's been a long week, but it's the weekend now! Seemed like would never get here! In a week thats been clouded by politics and policy, added to the weather getting colder and the nights drawing again once more I've been keeping myself focused by tinkering about with ideas for jewellery.

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I've got a couple of things in the pipeline at the moment, the first of which is earrings. I've worn my own designs for years now, especially skulls. I'll be making stud skull earrings and the skull drop style earrings I wear alot myself.

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Along with earrings I have also been painting beads to make into necklaces. Some of the beads I have been painting at the moment are decorated with flowers which is a bit of a departure from the skulls which dominate my current collection, but I have strung them alongside beads coloured with the shades of the rainbow in keeping with my bright, fun aesthetic.

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I think these bead necklaces will be a softer, more feminine side of Deviant Panda that people haven't seen so far! I'll keep you posted with these new items and any other ideas other the next few weeks, maybe sooner, and I'm going to be posting the concluding part of my inspirations for the current jewellery collection I have in my shop very soon!
Have a good weekend!
DP