The Fashion Loves Art auction on eBay has begun.  Click here to score an amazing piece by Tru$t Fun!, Beci, Greedy Hen, Yasmin Sewell, Mugen, David Band, Anne Zahalka, the list goes on! The bidding on some of them is starting at 99c.  Someone ban me from Paypal please!

Above are Beci and Jonathan’s and Shane’s (Tru$t Fun!) works.

Have a good weekend everyone!

I just thought I should blog to tell everyone that I have a “production team leader” now.  (He hates that title! Says it makes him sound like a 14 year old manager at McDonalds).

We’re both still offering external production and negotiation services to anyone without a rep, and we’re still using freelancers for support and casting, but Cam is my new right hand man, taking on all my production headaches.  He thinks I am crazy because I love sales and new business and I think he’s crazy for not giggling all the way through pre pro meetings.  Honestly, if certain chocolate clients demand all on set props in Pantone 2685C he doesn’t even crack a smile.  I don’t know how he does it!  I am a big fan of what he does.

Click to see some of Chris\’s current work

This stuff is really inventive, thought provoking and, well, pretty much plain old amazing.  Here’s a tiny sample (for more click the link above).

This image depicts 28,000 42-gallon barrels, the amount of of oil consumed in the United States every two minutes (equal to the flow of a medium-sized river).  It boggles the mind.  Thanks Dave for the link.

God, I was so excited about blogging this job, but now I am a bit disappointed. Julian shot this for Rhodes Wingrove for the IPA accountants professional body.  He did an amazing job of tailoring this to an impossible format and it is COMPLETELY lost on my blog.  It was a complicated job and Julian did the post himself.  The shot is, you would think, a classic stock shot, but with the media it would have been totally unaffordable.  It also didn’t exist in the format. So Julian used his personal image library from the Tignes/French glacier job for Beechams, and a stock shot of the peak, and shot the climber in studio.  It really works well as a massive mural.  I saw it at the airport yesterday and it looked really grand.  I am sorry you can’t really see it in all its glory here.  There are two more similarly amazing shots in this series including Julian’s recent trip to Dover to document the cliffs that represent to challenge of swimming the channel.

Ok so I said I wouldn’t tell anyone about Beci’s site because she is making cards especially for the launch, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer.  I did try.  And it’s a beautiful afternoon for wasting time on the internet.

Click here to see Beci\’s new site.

Here’s a preview in case you are so incredibly busy you don’t have time to click.

Beci has just completed these illustrations for a travel article in Sunday Life. They’re SO cute!  I really want her to make Beci Orpin luggage tags, or better yet, one of those printed suitcases for my kids!  She’s a big fan of Sunday Life so she really enjoyed working on the job and the art director was incredibly happy with it.

Westfield has invited 15 artists to interpret 15 brands at Westfield Doncaster.  Elvis Di Fazio and Ms Fitz were invited to interpret the Sportsgirl brand, Max Doyle interpreted Bally, Anne Zahalka interpreted Max Mara, Deborah Paauwe made a piece inspired by Hugo Boss, Painter Robert Doble’s interpreted AG, Beci Orpin worked with Lisa Gorman, Tru$tfun (Jonathan and Annie Zawada, and Shane Sakkeus) did a photographic piece with Ben Sullivan for Mecca, Greedy Hen worked with Zimmerman, and David Band made a piece for Country Road.

All works will be hanging in the woolshed (Docklands) all week during LMFF. They will then take up residency at Westfield Doncaster for two weeks. All works are for auction and proceeds go to charity Beyond Blue.  I’ll post the eBay auction links when they go live.  You may grab a bargain if you’re a known sniper like me.  Then again, even if you don’t you’ll be giving to an important charity.

Here are JZ’s and Beci’s pieces.  Beci’s were taken with a point and shoot.  The real thing is much more amazing. This just shows the detail in all its hand made beauty.

I have taken out a little ad on Design Files.  It looks super cute (big thanks to Jethro Cave at Viviens and Sophie Wilkinson at Scene by the way).  The Design Files is such a great resource.  It features some really in depth interviews and basically all the design happenings in this country.  I find it easily as inspiring as any of the internationational blogs, probably moreso as it’s all going on in our gigantic but largely uninhabited backyard.

Check out the link and add Design Files to your RSS feed.

Click here for the article and for a Monday morning full of inspiration!

This one is a bit of a tricky one to explain. Julian was approached by Adam Novak and John McCabe at BWM Dubai to produce an ad for the Dubai Lynx awards.  The job was to take the Palm Island and turn it into a light globe.  Julian collaborated with Willie from Cursor Ctrl and I guess you could say essentially art directed the image.  A lot of assignments are going this way, using part stock imagery and part image-making-skills which is where Julian comes in.  It’s a real niche for Julian as there aren’t that many photographers out there who can manage that level of post and visualise and piece together a job from beginning to end.  Huge thanks to Willie for an amazing job as usual.

I don’t know whether it’s patriotism or ego but there’s not a photographer in this country who doesn’t want to shoot for QANTAS.  For a photographer it’s akin to Nicole Kidman being put on a postage stamp.   This was one of those great simple ideas with really nice and simple art direction.  No butchering of the image or scary “look at moi” artwork.  Big thanks and well done to Kathy McKinnon.  It would be giving away trade secrets if I told you that she pulled this look off for under $500 in props, but hey, what the hell, we’ve all had to do it and we’re going to have to do it a lot more often in future.  It looks super classy so who cares!