Extended December Christmas Opening Hours

Well, it's that time of the year again and we've beefed up the Sweets Workshop opening hours to help you get your Christmas shopping done.  
Throughout December our opening hours will be: 

Monday to Friday: 10am – 6pm

Saturday: 9am – 5pm
Sunday: 10am – 4pm

Christmas Eve till Midday

An interview with Emma Simmons about her new exhibition 'Best Inner West'

  An exhibition of local landscapes by Emma Simmons
Opens 11th Oct - 3rd Nov

About you
I'm Emma Simmons, I am a Sydney based illustrator who enjoys drawing landscapes and suburban scenes. Sydney has a real mixture of architectural styles, offering plenty of inspiration to draw from and a few challenges as well.

I've have also had some fantastic opportunities to illustrate people's own homes, which has been a great challenge and given me quite a few different architectural styles to play with.

How long have you been drawing landscapes?
I started back in 2008, when I was working in Balmain. As Balmain is one of the oldest suburbs of Sydney, many of the buildings had a crumbly charm or 'character' if you like. I was always and am still collecting fabrics, laces and paper textures... and just started thinking about fabric patterns in the way I was thinking about the texture in the buildings.

Since then I have been drawing buildings that I love with their little quirks and buildings that have been a part of the history and lives of people in the inner west. 







How would you describe your style?
My drawing style is fairly loose. My line work is drawn freehand with ink, I add water colour which can create some lovely effects and textures. I then digitally add different textures and fabric patterns that I think might represent a surface well. The end result is a texture rich digital collage.

Along side my digital collages, I have created some small Gocco prints for this show, hand finished in watercolour and metallic ink.

What interests you in the old inner west?

To be honest I'm interested in the signs of age that visually show a buildings history, whether it be the architectural style or the deteriorating condition. The way that we use these buildings is constantly changing along with the needs of the community and the population and often they are gutted and re-purposed, the suburban landscape is always shifting. 

What can people expect to see at your show?
The show features some of my favourite scenes and buildings of the Inner West. Looking at all of the pieces in the show as a collection, you might say that I have a fascination for recording older buildings, in some cases documenting them before they disappear.

'Best Inner West', An Exhibition of Local Landscapes by Emma Simmons

Opens 11th Oct until 3rd Nov

Sweets Workshop's Emma Simmons will be opening her second exhibition of landscapes of the Inner West.

With a huge amount of inspiration in the local area, drawing scenes of Sydney's Inner West has become a little bit of an obsession for Emma. The show will feature some iconic landmarks and show off some of her favourite local private commissions of people's homes. Emma's works are created from ink, watercolour an fabric textures.

'Best Inner West' opens over the weekend of the 11th and 12th of October and closes on the 3rd November. The official opening is at 2.00pm on Saturday 11th October at Sweets Workshop. The exhibition will also be open on Sunday 12th October as part of the  festivities for Summer Hill's Neighbourhood Feast.

Sneak Peak of 'The Rio Milkbar'

What a Weekend! Sweets Workshop at the Sydney Finders Keepers Market

Our thanks go out to the Finders Keepers team for having us as part of the Sydney Market last weekend. As always it was a fabulous, fun event, with loads of tempting goodies created by very talented people, to see and buy. 

It was great to see many familiar faces over the weekend, thank you for swinging by to say hello and spend some time with us. We'd also like to say a thank you to all who took home a little piece of Sweets Workshop with them, we hope you enjoy what we have made.

Head over to our Facebook page to check out some more pics of our weekend at the Sydney Finders Keepers Market.

The Sydney Finders Keepers Market

This Friday and Saturday Sweets Workshop will be closed as we are packing up and moving in to the Finders Keepers Markets. We will be launching some of our new illustration works and groovy record bags exclusively for the Sydney Market. The market will be open at 6pm on Friday 6th of June and close at 5pm Saturday 7th June at the Australian Technology Park.

There will be loads of talented designers, musicians and delicious treats to keep you busy and entertained over the long weekend.

We hope to see you there.
(please note, the shop at Summer Hill will be closed on the 6th and 7th June)

Interview with artist Jackie Case

An Exhibition by Jackie Case
26th April - 17th June

You are a Melbourne based artist, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Jackie Case was born and raised in the very ‘Zone One’ suburb of North Balwyn in a Dental Surgery. Yes, the distinct smell of disinfectant and toothpaste feels just like home. Jackie was equal middle child in a large family of six siblings. In such chaos, retreating upstairs with a pad of paper and a handful of pencils Jackie could find peace and relaxation within her own imagination. Drawing was a very private and internal past time, showing others her work made her feel very embarrassed and vulnerable. She would always make her friends hold her folio at the tram stop because she didn’t like people knowing she ‘thought’ she could draw. At sixteen Jackie decided the best way to support herself financially was to get her B.A in Graphic Design, which she later did at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (R.M.I.T). Always with the hope of pursuing a fine art Jackie travelled extensively going to every major Art Museum and Gallery as humanly possible. Finally around 2003 Jackie put down the computer mouse and picked up a pencil... Jackie’s work can now be found in private collections all over the world including representation by Rebecca Hossack Gallery London. 

 Woolly Mammoth

What is the concept behind your upcoming exhibition at Sweets Workshop, what can people expect to find?
The concept for the Sweets Workshop exhibition is small but detailed quirky little slices of life. A mixture of complicated technique with often simple but endearing images. Expect to find anything from ‘Straw Sucking Gold Fish’, to extraordinary detailed trees, if Jackie finds the subject interesting maybe someone else will too. Jackie’s artist style was first inspired by the technique of etchings. The warmth of shading juxtaposed against the beautiful strength of line and intricate detail. Today Jackie focuses heavily on the line work in an effort of produce ever increasing detail.

What materials do you like to work with?
Jackie uses simple pencil and eraser as well as some ink on paper to create her drawings. Her technique has been perfected over many years and countless hours of drawing. Her fine drawing ingenuity she attributes to her Father (the Dental Surgeon) with steady hands she too inherited. 

Couldface Woodface

What inspires your work?
Everything inspires Jackie’s work. She has ‘lifetimes’ of ideas and even if she revisits an idea again she finds there are so many directions they can go. At the start of each drawing session Jackie simply doesn’t know what drawings she will produce. “It’s exciting to just wait and see what comes. To stare at a blank piece of paper and not know what to draw lasts only for a second. These are often my best drawings as I have no preconceived ideas.”
 
Do you have any advice for emerging artists?
“My advice to emerging artists is show your work as often as possible. I started out in my local Cafe. It’s a great place to learn what sells and what works for your audience. The costs are minimal and your out lay is basically your time. Learning to get ‘over myself’ was probably the most difficult first step. Another great piece of advice I go was from a dear friend; “Just because a work doesn’t sell doesn’t mean it’s not good. You just haven’t found your right audience”. I’m really excited about showing at Sweets Workshop. It’s the wonderful mixture of small and quirky, with real heart and soul...” just like Jackie Case’s drawings.     

Interview with artist Nic Dalton

Nic Dalton kicks off our exhibition season for 2014 

with his show opening 15th Feb until 11th March 2014.

Nic has worked in the music industry for many years. He's a musician with his own label and has played in numerous bands including the Lemonheads and Ratcat, he also DJ's regularly around Sydney. Something you might not know about Nic is that he is an artist at heart. In this interview Nic talks about returning to his first passion and working on his 'first ever' painting exhibition.

Tell us a bit about you and your background, you are not just an artist...

 When I left school in the early 80s, my parents wanted me to go to art school in Sydney like my eldest sister did.  I thought that if I went to art school, I’d start a band with fellow students and we’d all fight over who got to design the record covers.  So I went and started a band instead. When I would run into old school friends, they couldn’t believe I wasn’t doing art.  I did feel like I had left my true love (art) and taken up with that wild and crazy girl (music). But over the last thirty years of being a musician and songwriter, I have done so much art, not just for all the bands I’ve been in, but for my record label Half A Cow and the bookshop of the same name. I have sold paintings online to friends and fans over the years but this is my first exhibition of my artwork.

This is your first solo art exhibition though you've been creating art for many years, have you enjoyed putting the show together? What have been some of the challenges you have faced? 

 I started working on new work for this exhibition in the middle of 2012 and thought I’d be ready around six months ago. How wrong I was! Even though I pretty much had every day available to paint, life (in the form of two young children and late nights djing or playing shows) got in the way. Since this is my first public display, I really felt I had to lift my game and challenge myself with some new ideas. A local gypsy jazz band called the Spyglass Gypsies inspired me to do some paintings of them and I have found these to be a lot more work that I anticipated!

 

Can you tell us about the concept and ideas explored in your show, what can people expect to see? 

Most of the art is from the last year and a half but I have also included one or two older ones that I wanted to be a part of the exhibition. Like my music, there is a bit of variety but I have a few themes I have always liked to paint. These are homely tea pot scenes, my ‘alien’ characters (an indigenous tribe of world travelers) and pop art collage pieces that I have been refining since school days. Bright and poppy, just like a Monkees song.

  

Can you tell us a bit about your artistic processes?

I use acrylic paints (from years of touring, the paintings can be packed away in a jiffy as they dry so quickly!) and collage. I have a large supply of old magazines, record covers from the 50s and 60s and a huge box of those colour test strips from packaging that seems to make its way onto most of my artwork!

What inspires your work? 

Sport. No, only joking. As far as other artists go, I am inspired by so much great art of the Twentieth Century (Marc Chagall, Martin Sharp, Albert Tucker, Warhol, Sydney Long, Sonia Delaunay, Mondrian, Charles Blackman, the Art Deco movement and architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh) and the art and spirit of the original Australians. Music and books also inspire my subject matter as does a good cup of tea and a lie down.