Here is my zine illustration for the Love/Hate zine, put together by the Aussie Illustration Team.

I think Emma’s piece totally rocks.

Honestly…why even consider buying from retail giant outlets when you can choose to buy from an independent designer and get a really beautiful handmade item?

I wouldn’t expect myers to send my goodies with a handwritten note to thank me for my purchase, and also include bunny drawings (because the seller obviously knows I have a bunny obsession). On top of that the seller also made me a very crazy rabbit brooch to accompany my skirt, which looks half Frankenstein and half rabbit. I’ve named it Franco by the way.

I don’t think the pictures do any justice to this cute skirt, sorry Franz…I tried to do a Lyptis pose but I just can’t!

If you’d like a Lyptis outfit too, why don’t you check out her shop? Speak to Franz about her colour swatches! I picked mine in blue grey.

Showing off some lovely things from some perth illustrators at Unwrapped. I loved all of the beautiful handmade creations in every stall. But I was pressed for time to look around quickly and run back to my stall. My fiance was so nervous at being alone at a table filled with girly stationery. He actually pleaded with me, ‘come back quick ok?’

I bought some lovely art prints/cards from Niina Aoki, Ali J and Made of Awesome. I love them all and I’m pretty pleased as punch to keep a piece of their artwork.

Here is the sweet Niina, she makes these gorgeous buhni cushions. I have one that I use as a chair pillow! You know I love bunnies…or any animal really! So these are sweet ass!

How do experienced vendors do this all the time? We’re totally exhausted from our first market!

We just want to say thanks to all our friends who turned up to give us that moral support at Unwrapped market! It was super awesome! As first timers, we were so stoked with the positive response and experience from our customers! Thanks to all you crazy strangers who became our Little Mo fan clubbers! You totally made our day! We didn’t expect such great sales for our first range of paper goods.

The most asked questions of the day were:
1. Is Little Mo you?
2. Are you guys selling imported stuff from china?
3. You made these? As in designed everything? But they look really good!
4. Who designed this?

In future, I will put a sign up that says EVERYTHING is designed and illustrated by Helena Tay and professionally printed in Australia. Nothing is from China except my grandfather! Anyway attaching pictures of our stall and the real little mo. Check it out yo!

Will post pictures of the lovely handmade things I bought in my next post.

Fiance and I, we have this habit of making little things for each other like mix tapes, handmade cards, comic strips..lunchbox letters…or anything for laughters. Recently we celebrated our 6 years anniversary so I thought I’d give him a unique gift you know.

So I asked the lovely Linz from FaerieMajikk to make me a custom artwork. I had seen her fantasy and erotica work before and thought they were really unique. So I said to her, ‘just make me sexy…I think the boy will love it.’ And I gave her the freedom to draw whatever she wanted.

The custom piece turned out to be a huge surprise for the both of us. When it arrived, we were giggling like school kids!! The boy took forever to open the package (either he was trying to savour the moment or Linz had it packaged so thoroughly…I think I heard the boy saying it was like opening one russian doll after another!) But lo and behold, the piece was so stunning in real life!

Because of my love for nature, Linz drew me in a very cute number amongst all the lovely trees! (May have to ask Franz to design an outfit like that for me too!) But we absolutely loved it! Everything about the artwork was truly unique and lovely. We have our very own helena faerie!

And that’s the beauty of art! Every artist has his or her own style. We could be drawing different themes, different styles, different mediums! I love that about art, I love observing and collecting art and I love supporting other independent artists. Linz, thank you so much…we’re so happy to have a piece of your work at our place!

If you’d like to have your very own custom fantasy artwork, visit Linz’s shop and get in touch with her!

For the second shoot, we shot inside the studio, in the green screen room. We had some scenes that needed special effects in them and so the green screen was helpful for keying out these shots. This is a continuation of the factory scene and so once again our beloved conveyor belt is lapping up the camera’s attention.

The device you see on the picture is called a jib. Sometimes you see sweeping shots in a movie scene; where the camera sweeps across the floor in slow or fast motion, or sweeps up and moves away. This is what the jib does. The jib can also be used to shoot top down shots or low angles. Here the boys are fastening the camera to the jib to shoot a top down shot of the conveyor belt. Jibs can vary in sizes, the more ambitious your shots, the bigger and grander the jib.

This scene took us the whole day to shoot, but was relatively easier than the first shoot. I’ll post again when we head down to do location shooting for our next shoot.

Apart from working on Little Mo and Friends, I also freelance in graphic design and media production work. One of our first projects for this year is a music video shoot for local band, Blac Blocs. Shot in stop motion animation.

This is the factory scene, where the workers are working at the assembly line. We made the conveyor belt a day before by putting together a make shift table, some aluminum pieces and black rubber mats. On screen, when cropped, it looked pretty convincing…which was all that mattered to us.

On the day of the shoot, with the help of the band members, we moved each item on the conveyor belt frame by frame. Such is the process for stop motion animation. And if anyone has seen stop motion animation (like the RAC ad on tv), you’ll know that it’s really tough and grueling work and often takes up to two to three days to shoot one scene!

Ours took two days to shoot this factory scene. In my next post, I’ll show you some scenes where we shot inside the studio using green screen.