Who else cannot believe we're a quarter of the way into 2025 already? It's been a slow, but good start of the year for business, and the next few months ahead is looking incredibly busy for me, so I'm actually quite grateful the first three months has been easy-going.
I happily teamed up with some students from Scott Point School again during March, to create some smaller colourful artworks to bring colour to their playground area. The students worked fast and hard and we smashed out 12 mini-panels in 6 days!
We worked around the colours of their school houses - Totara (blue), Pohutukawa (red), Rimu (green) and Kowhai (yellow).
The yr 2 students came in and painted some background colours on one day and the rest of the background colours were filled in by the yr3-4 students, while the yr5-6 students spent time painting the base coats for the finer elements and the yr7-8 students finished off the artworks with the final details and outlines.
It's always such a pleasure to see the children experience how an artwork look at the start and compare it to the finish product - even the teachers still get amazed at the process and end result. 

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Some projects take a little longer to complete than others, yet when they are done they seem to really create an impact. Such was my recent experience with a busstop beautification project I was commissioned for. About a year ago I was approached by the Rangatua Community Centre to assist with creating a 'quick win' project. Rangataua is a small village in the North Island of New Zealand. It is located at the southern end of both the Tongariro National Park and Rangataua State Forest, adjacent to the southwestern slopes of the active volcano Mount Ruapehu. And when I say a small village, it literally only has 160 residents as of June 2023. The busstop in question is the ONLY busstop for the school children in the village and as such the residents wanted to add some colour and pay homage to local fauna and flora. The artwork was designed to cover the entirety of the busstop. With Rangatua over 4 hours away from my studio, I set out to create artworks across 12 panels to be installed across the interior and exterior of the busstop.

After a couple of back and forths between myself and the Rangatua Community centre volunteers, we settled on two designs to use and I set to work in figuring out how to display these across the measurements and angles fo the busstop.

After many days and weeks of painting, with few sunny days to take my paintings outdoors and ensure all the artworks are lined up, I finally finished and we loaded all the panels onto a trailer and headed 4.5hrs south to Rangatua to do the installation. 

A few locals drove by while we were doing the installation, waving and smiling and the local children cycling past excitedly stopped by and told us how excited they were to come and wait at the busstop for their school bus now that there's some art to look at.

These types of projects really makes all the hardwork so worthwhile. Seeing the colours bring an old busstop back to life and hearing the excitement in the children's voices, watching their faces light up as they recognize the various animals and flowers, naming and counting them as they look and appreciate the beauty of their surroundings captured in art.

Thank you to everyone at the Rangatua Community Centre for trusting me with this project and allowing me to leave a piece of myself in your wonderful community.

At the start of the year I was commissioned to do a children's book illustration for a new author. Two stories, based on real events, made their way into my inbox and page by page I brought the characters to life. With loads of communication and direction from the author, each page started to take shape and now these books are available as ebooks, with plans in the works for hardcopy publishing within New Zealand.
These stories are short, but fun and adventurous and perfect for a quick bedtime read for the little ones!
Have a look at a sample of the first book "Naughty Nelly and Borring Bilbo - The great Escape" over on Amazon.

I absolutely loved playing around with all the colours of the sunset for this painting. It's a reasonably large canvas and with so much space to fill I thought I'd experiment with using spraypaint to get the base colours laid down, and it worked really nicely! I find it so much quicker and easier to create smooth blends of colour using spraypaint, although I still had to go in with some brush work after to get more depth and richness of colour on some areas. The sky on the left went through a few different layers of work as I tried to get more of the light blue and white with yellow glow to reflect off those wispy clouds and I definately had to step away for a day to get rid of some frustrations building up while the sky turned a bit muddy...but after a bit of reflection on the right tones and techniques I finally was able to capture the right colours!
The little girls in the foreground was an added extra requested by the client to represent their daughters, as this artwork is a gift to her husband on their wedding anniversary! It's always such an honour to be able to create something so meaningful and personal for someone.

Some images of the process as colours were added in...

And as I was experimenting while creating this painting, I managed to salvage my experimentation and created another, much smaller painting along the same vibe... :-) It's always fun when experiments turn into fun pieces of art!

At the end of 2023 I was approached by Scott Point School to facilitate the creation of a collaborative mural with all their students. Scott Point School is a full primary, which meant I needed to come up with a design that would enable the youngest to the oldest to participate in painting the final artwork. 
Our first step was to ask the students to bring in a taonga (special item) from home that represented something of their family or culture. The school has a diverse cultural make up, with not only Maori and Kiwi students, but families from across Asia, the Pasific islands, Africa and Latin American, Indian, Middle Eastern and European. 
It was interesting to see and inspect the taonga brought in from some of the students and a lot of these items were included in the final artwork design. 
The base for the design started with incorporating the school logo in the centre of the design and then using the flow of the waves from there to expand to the other cultures. 

As the percentages of the different cultures vary, we decided to use that as our point of combination onto the seperate panels - thus the 4 center panels represent the largest communities within the school and the four on the ends are a combination of the smaller communities. Watching and listenting to the children work on these was wonderful as they not only discovered the differences between cultures, but also the similarities. As they discussed these with each other they found better a understanding of each others cultural practises and traditions and shared freely about their own. Many would freely express their appreciation for each others cultures, as well as their shock about things that were completely opposite within various traditions. It was amazing to listen to them discuss and learn and just share openly about their own cultures and being eager to learn about others.

The children assisted with every step of the process, from painting the white base coats (which they found extremely uninspiring) to the blending of the background hues and all the items making up the final design. Even the year 1 and 2's participated with creating some of the items using handprints. Have a closer look at the African hat, the Chinise lanterns, the Asian hats, Pasifika fans and pyramids. The main colours on those items have all been created with different coloured handprints from the year ones and twos. We also had some of the teachers come in to spend 30 minutes or an hour to make their mark painting some of the more detailed works and patterns. It was a joy to see the and hear the whole school community appreciate the artworks whenever they entered the room where we were working and to hear them talk about how far the work had come from the blank panels and every step in between.

All in all, I was very impressed with the participation of the school and the behaviour of the students. It was a pleasure working with Scott Point School and I look forward to seeing what other creative endeavours they come up with in the future.

I was commissioned by Pakuranga Heights School in the South of Auckland to create a large mural for a playground wall, featuring sports silhouettes and inspirational quotes, provided by the school. 
This project required some oversized stencil, and these were hand cut by myself. The backgrounds of the silhouettes features some brightly coloured gradients and the majority of this artwork was created using spray paint. 
I love how the artwork turned out and the fun, bright colours are a great addition to the school playground. It was also great fun to see and hear the childrens' reactions while we were installing the art. I think they will enjoy watching and playing around this artwork almost as much as I enjoyed created it! 

The Beautification Trust runs a yearly competition for artists to submit designs for the Chorus Cabinets throughout South Auckland.
This year, I submitted a design, however did not win. Wiri Business Association got some eyes on my design though, and commissioned me to paint a Chorus Cabinet! I really enjoyed this project as it was out and about and it added a splash of colour! It was also lovely to have some interaction with the public walking and driving past while I was working!
The majority of this artwork was created using spray paints, and the finer details on the birds were created using Resene test pots.
If you're ever in driving down Plunket avenue in Manukau, see if you can spot this beauty!!

I was recently approached by Serko - a corporate travel agency - to recreate a Hobbit house in their Auckland offices. They are located in the Saatchi & Saatchi building in Parnell, a wonderfully industrial looking building with wooden beams and metal works exposed and a historic building nonetheless. They added some three-dimensional elements on the wall they had inserted to be painted, such as a circular door and some MDF board in the shape of bricks and roof overhang.

I was transported back about 20 odd years, to my very first painting job after studies - having to create special painting effects on board to make things look like brick and wood! It was good to see those years didn't go to waste and the knowledge came flooding back whilst working on this project.
I await further images from the client as they are still busy gathering some more fake plants to finish off the scene, but I'm rather happy with how it turned out in the end!

I recently ordered some branded stickers to use with the newest additions to my business - just as an extra bit of marketing - and I've been pleasantly impressed with how nicely they add that finishing touch to parcels being sent out to customers.
I would love to create some other arty stickers as well as my kids, and myself, love decorating and scrap booking with stickers and constantly order stickers from all over the place.

StickerDot has a variety of finishing options to choose from - from paper stickers, vinyl stickers and special premium stickers with embossing, foil paper, hologram or dome finishings. They also offer different sizes and shapes of stickers for you to choose from!

If you're in need of some affordable stickers - for parties, branding, just for fun or to use for promotions and whether it be on a roll, a sheet, kiss cut or die cut, vinyl, decal, special paper or kraft paper - check out Stickerdot's affordable sticker options on their easy to navigate  website and get your order done online, with a reasonably fast turnaround time and delivery!
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