We´ve moved!

Hi everyone!

Despite my recent rant concerning the use of wordpress, I have to say that I spoke too fast. I tamed it!

It´s still a work in progress, but this blog is now being merged with my portfolio site. So, head on over to airdesignstudio.com, browse around and subscribe to read my posts the moment they´re published.

It´s right here: www.airdesignstudio.com

See you there!

It´s here!

Yay, January issue of "We´re in Panama!" is now out. As usual, you can download it free here. Please leave a comment telling me what you liked - or didn´t!

Have a great weekend! We´re heading to the beach for the weekend with a group of friends. Have fun!

Almost!

This week I´ve been frantically working on the January issue of "We´re in Panama!"

I had a late start, with Christmas vacation in Portugal, but now it´s almost, almost ready. This issue is made with freehand embroidery on paper, and it will be available... hopefully before January is over!

Uh oh...

These last few days I´ve been trying to give my portfolio website a revamp. It needed some updating, and since I was jumping into the wordpress pool to do it, I´d also change theme and refresh things a bit.

I think wordpress is a great platform, full of people who work for free or on a donation basis. It´s open coded and everything, and expandable ad infinitum.

But it just does not work for me. All my experiences with wordpress have been terribly complicated, even if the instructions provided (again, for free) are very detailed. To cut a long story short, I´ve made up my mind - though I grief for the loss of the look I really wanted for my portfolio - and am moving to blogger.

So, sometime in the near future, this blog will be effectively morphed into my portfolio site (something I wanted to do with my previous portfolio site, with no success).

I think wordpress is great - just not for me. And I´m very sorry for that.

Any comments or suggestions regarding portfolio sites and blogging platforms? Please let me know!

Sketchbook Project

Just sent out my sketchbook for Sketchbook Project. I had a lot of fun putting it together! My theme was "in five minutes...", so I decided to add "...or less" to it. It has many quick sketches, and then freehand embroidered drawings - which obviously took longer than 5 minutes to make, but time went so fast it felt like only a short while had passed.

I´ll post more pictures soon and you can find its flickr set here.

(Background is a wonderful "chita de Alcobaça" my mother in law gave me for Christmas.)

Happy 2011!

I had a wonderful holiday season, how about you? There were the typical colds and sore throats (too much of a temperature change, going from the tropics to the winter in Lisbon), but seeing friends and family was heartwarming and... plain good.

Now I´m back to Panama, to work, to my routine. I missed it too.

I´m finishing my sketchbook for the sketchbook project going on. Deadline is friday, so I´m giving it its final tweaks. Experimenting without restrictions has been fun. I´ll post some pictures when I send it off.

I´ll leave you with a poster I made for a conference, next week in Lisbon. It was my last project of 2010 and it was so much fun to do that I definitely hope that 2011 brings more work like this.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy Holidays!

2010 is close to its end and the holiday season is upon us. Handmade presents are wrapped (and photographed, but not posted due to potential spoiler danger), bags are packed with winter clothes and pojects are all finished.

I´m not even bringing my knitting - just a sketchbook- as there´s plenty of cooking, baking, wrapping, decorating, meeting friends, being with family... all that waiting for me there!

Happy Holidays everyone, and see you in 2011!

"We´re in Panama!" #7, the moisture issue, is here!

The December issue, dealing with those (bad) mouldy surprises we´ve been having, is here! Download it here, it´s free!

Please leave a comment or send me an e-mail with your stories and photos reading it. It´s always a pleasure to know how you enjoy and explore it! Thank you.

Links to previous issues are right there on the sidebar. Enjoy!

All work and play

I think that the best part of my work is that so many times it feels just like play. I´m now working on the December issue of my e-zine but stamping all these words just make them look and feel so much better.

Life in Panama

The other day I was painting away on my balcony. There´s plenty of sea view (I can even see the entrance to the Canal) but there´s also this view:



And as latin as Panama is, everytime I step on the balcony (be it to water my plants or hang clothes to dry), I hear the men working there whistling and shouting comments. This may sound like I´m bragging, but hearing the comments you´d know that I´m not. Just not.

Anyway, so the other day I was painting and I start hearing this guy shouting and shouting, and repeating the same word over and over. Normally I just ignore it as white noise and concentrate on the waves, but this time it surfaced to conscience.

I pause. I look over.

There´s this guy, holding his protective yellow helmet on one hand, waving and shouting: "paint me! paint me!".

I wonder what he´d think if I asked him to model. In the nude.

Anyway, I finished my first canvas here in Panama:



(...and I really, really need to replace my camera. It will be 6 years old in February.)

Issue #6 of "We´re in Panama!"

November issue of "We´re in Panama!" is now online! As usual, it´s free to download, and you can find it here. Print it out and enjoy it!

I love receiving all your comments and e-mails, so this month I´ll be raising the feedback bar: I´m preparing a presentation about my e-zine and want to include photos of readers - of you. Please send me your images of you, your kids, your friends reading this e-zine, or this e-zine travelling to different parts of the globe. The best images will be included in the presentation!

Oh, I can´t wait!

Enjoy reading it!

Buenos Aires revisited

Going back to Buenos Aires felt a bit like going home. I needed to get a haircut, to visit my osteopath, buy some buttons (as if there were no buttons in Panama) and go to my favourite restaurants.





I didn´t visit one single museum - but I walked and walked, sat under the blooming jacarandas and took my sketchbook out to draw.



I had tea with friends, making up for a social life I still don´t have in Panama. I realized, those ties and friendships I created there were thicker and deeper than I had thought.

I saw Christmas decorations (this is end of November, already?) and felt cold, after six months of hot, humid weather. There was cold wind and sleeping with a blanket, hot sun and lots of blooming roses at the Rosedal de Palermo.



There was the girl in Osaka who recognized us and helped us with an off the menu request - she made me happier than she knows. As if it weren´t enough, I bought myself a good, solid portion of choc-salt cookies. And for once the lack of coins served my purpose: change was given in cookies. Oh, yum!



After five days of walking, feeling, experiencing a return to a city where I lived, where I was happy (and unhappy too), where I met so many new friends and met a new me, I came back to my new home in Panama. We´ll see where this ride takes us.



(Guess who came along?



Oh yeah.)

After many, many months...

...I´m painting again and it feels so good. I missed all the brushes and colours and the freedom they contain in themselves.

Painting makes me happy.

(more photos here)

Just because it´s pretty

(photo taken back in October in Bocas del Toro, Panamá. Nice, nice place to visit, but remember to bring mosquito repellent.)

A first: azulejos!

Sometime ago my friend A. asked me to design a panel of portuguese traditional, hand-painted tiles ("azulejos") to match the coat-hanger she wanted to have by the main door in her new flat.

I was thrilled with this project! Not only it was the first time I ever designed an azulejo - I studied lots and lots of designs when I was in university, but unfortunately never got to design my own -, but also because I love, love patterns and that chemistry that happens when you put modules side by side and repeat them.

The brief was to design something that was based in traditional patterns, but with a modern twist. I came up with a design and crossed my fingers. The tiles were brilliantly executed at Azulejaria Santiago, where they were brilliantly hand-painted and later installed in their spot.

I´m thrilled with the result and looking forward to working again with patterns and azulejo!

(Not so much a) sidenote: if you´ve ever been to Lisbon and rode the subway or just wandered around the streets, you´ll know how much azulejo tiles are used in public spaces. One of the greatest panel designers is the living legend Maria Keil, a huge inspiration to me. Check out some of her work by clicking here.

All images by Christophe Sauvage.

So many things

These have been very introspective times here in this studio of mine. I´ve been having loads of work (which I´m thankful for) and am, constantly, searching for more work, creating new projects and presenting new ideas to potential clients.

It´s been busy, busy, and I haven´t felt like posting much. Sorry.

One thing that has been on my mind is the (long overdue) portfolio website redo. Oh dear. I wonder if I´m alone in this, but just thinking about having to change it makes my heart shrink a bit. It´s not that I don´t think it needs to be updated - it´s just that working on something that I can´t control (because I don´t know enough when it comes to web design) and therefore takes me three times longer than it should makes want to jump off my 49th floor balcony. Ok, not so literally, but you get my drift.

Other than that, it´s still kind of weird not to have four seasons, but only two: it´s still pretty much rainy, terribly wet all the time. Not too hot, though, which is fine. It´s almost the end of the year and I don´t feel it around me. No yellow leaves on the floor (as during my northern hemisphere days) nor purple jacaranda trees (as in Buenos Aires), so sometimes I must check the calendar just to be sure. It´s November. It´s chestnut and fireplace time in Portugal.

Anyway, enough about this. Here´s some of the things I managed to do on my breaks from my design projects:



This is my third attempt at knitting a Christmas present for someone mysterious - can´t say that person´s name as he or she does not know he or she is a recipient of a knitted gift.

The first finished sweater was too small (but too cute to frog); the second one was rightly sized, but not well designed; therefore, frogged.

This is the third go. We´ll see how it goes.



We use cloth napkins at home and needed our stocks refilled, so I bought some native kuna design fabrics (100% cotton, unfortunately not organic) and sewed a pretty simple hemline on them. There´s a learning curve in sewing, people!

And I finally started painting again. This time, there´s no class, no studio, no model, just me, my brushes and the beautiful view from the balcony. We´ll see where that takes us.

What have you been up to lately?

An issue with clouds

An issue of "We´re in Panama!", that is! This time around it´s all about the clouds in the sky during this (very) rainy season. Check it out here!

You know how it works: download it, print it, fold it and comment! Or better still: send me a picture of your copy of the zine in the wild!

Let´s be escapees?

While I draw clouds, clouds and more clouds, I´ve been listening to the wonderful podcast "Escape from Illustration Island" and the interviews its host, Thomas James, conducts.

First of all, let us all thank modern day technology that has me here, sitting alone in my studio, listening to wonderful interviews of people who have been through the same experience as me and also other people who have lots of good information and advice for me.

Then, not only interviewees have interesting testimonials to share, the questions they are asked are very pertinent too. Sometimes it feels like Thomas actually reads minds (or maybe my questions are the same as other people´s?) and asks exactly what I was thinking.

Anyway, this has been an excellent resource for me, specially now that I´ve moved to another country and need to start a new client database here, from scratch.

If you haven´t yet, I encourage you to download "Escape from Illustration Island" now. All in all, very good. Praise to Thomas!

Clouds, clouds, clouds

Among other projects - in the middle of them, in the little spaces between them - I´ve been working on the October´s issue of my e-zine "We´re in Panama!" (links to previous issue on your right).

It´s amazing how much one project can bring fun and joy to a work´s day!

Largo do Conde Barão, Lisboa

Went to Lisbon for a couple of weeks to visit friends and family and perform (very happily, I may add) my aunt-duties. Among these duties is taking the older niece to her music class, wait, pick her up and drive her back. While I was waiting I went for a walk and stopped to draw this. It´s strangely quiet at that time, maybe because it is one way only and the exiting traffic must go through another street. Beautiful - and very lisbonesque.