New Rain featuring Daleen Roodt

The amazing Daleen Roodt (see this post) has collaborated with Martie Erasmus of New Rain Clothing to produce a Summer 2013 collection that features prints from Daleen's paintings of indigenous orchids. I can't tell you how much I love these dresses, so I'm going to post a few photos from my sneak peek at the lookbook. Also, Martie and Daleen modelled the collection themselves; they are awesome.










That's Martie's email address you see above. Mail her and she'll send you the whole lookbook. There are also some custom options available, so get your orders in before the 26th of July.

Please note: I was not paid in any way or even asked to do this post.

50 seconds of fame

If you are here in South Africa and you take a look at 50/50 this coming Monday night at 7:30 on SABC 2, you might just see me and my friend/doppelganger Daleen Roodt being interviewed at a book launch!

A lot of people haven't quite figured out that Daleen and I are actually two separate people, since we look kind of the same, wear the same sort of clothes (what this really means is that I am madly envious of her sense of style) and both did language degrees before going slightly insane and deciding to become freelance botanical artists.

For anyone who doesn't know me, here's how to tell us apart. It's quite easy actually: she'll be the one with long, wavy blonde hair wearing a really great dress with flowery patterns on it looking like a normal human being and I'll be the socially awkward one with a deer-in-the-headlights kind of expression who doesn't look anyone in the eye and talks nonsense in really bad Afrikaans.

Why am I encouraging people to watch this?

Fanart, sorta

Somewhat obscure and oblique fanart. I get very oblique when I'm at my most fangirly, to try and protect my dignity.

This is part of my ongoing attempt to learn to draw people properly. I started with the quote underneath. It took me ages to get the lines perfectly misaligned, by feeding the page into an old typewriter at a slightly different angle for each line. I discovered that the typewriter has a setting where it doesn't use the ink ribbon. I'm not sure what it's for - possibly cleaning the keys - but I used it for the last line, where it produced an attractive blind-embossed effect. Of course the scanner didn't approve of that at all, and I spent hours on GIMP with the clone tool, trying to recreate the letters.

After the words were typed I drew in the figure. Originally the plan was to colour it and go mad with ink and so on, but now I like it so much that I'm afraid to touch it again. I figured that if I scanned it in and posted it it would gain some sort of permanence, so if I mess it up completely after this it's not a total waste.