Buttons goes to the Moon, otherwise known as Mark gets Kate to do an elaborate favour, again.

I have a friend we're going to refer to as Mark. Mark is useless. Yet somehow he hits the right balance of insulting and inappropriate jokes, a sprinkling of cuteness and abolutely ridiculously insane and inflammatory ideas, so we keep him around, and laugh helplessly and hysterically at pretty much everything he says. It doesn't help that I introduced him to a friend of mine who we will call Carmen (possibly the only person on earth who could stand Mark's sense of humour) and now they're totes in wuv fowevver and I get a double dose of him. He calls her Buttons. She makes baby talk noises. I regret ever letting them in the same room, but these things happen.

Mark likes to come up with new and more useless ways to utilise my drawing skills, and apparently he's a really good salesperson because I always seem to go with it. The most recent is a long string of illustrated children's books, which are usually highly inappropriate and not intended for children at all. The current one is called "Buttons goes to the moon" which he'll be getting published through blurb.com (super cool, take a look!) as a gift for Carmen's birthday, and our conversation went something like this:

Mark "Make Buttons really pretty and feminine... give her really cute whiskers"
Me "Is Buttons meant to be Carmen?"
Mark "Definitely not"
Me "So this bit where the space dog has sex with Buttons definitely isn't about Carmen?"
Mark "I would never write something like that. That's completely inappropriate Kate. Geez."
Me "..."
Mark "So anyway, when Carmen gets to the moon, I want her to play some moon badminton before she fucks the space dog..."

And so on.

Here are a couple sneak peeks of the illustrations, my style underwent a drastic change part way through when I decided Buttons needed to look infinitely more spastic if she was destined for a Mark book.

Introduction

Chances are that if you're reading this, I sent you here and you have at least a vague notion of who I am. If you don't... well, that's even better. I'm a big fan of making it up as I go.

I'm a 25 year old developer + designer + illustrator living in Australia, dreaming about cooking, crafting and ridiculously unnecessary projects. I've just left an incredibly stressful full time job of 3 years and I'm in the middle of some sort of month long brain-splosion while I get my mind around all the huge new possibilities in my life. I'm currently super excited to be getting a work/life balance back in play while I freelance, and I'm feeling incredibly thankful for all the little daily moments I've been missing out on for years while working 12+ hours a day.

Amazingly I've been lucky enough to have my long-time partner (hereby known only as Boyfriend) resign at the same time, so we'll be freelancing together while we try and wrap our minds around the ridiculously large changes in our lives! Yay! (I think).

At the moment, everything from actually going outside during the day, to tackling a long-intended project hand screen-printing designs is like some sort of miracle, and we've both been taking the time just to stop and watch the tiny disney-esque birds on our lawn each day and breathe easy knowing we can just slow down. Just having time to stop and appreciate life is absolutely blowing my mind... which may be why I've suddenly taken on way more projects than a sane person can handle. But hey, I'm used to the insane part, so we'll see how I go!

So this seems like a great time to start keeping a record of my life, creative ventures, and slightly retarded ideas. Please don't judge me... unless you think I'm doing fantastically. In which case, judge away.