Created in Birmingham

April was a busy month by the looks of things. The 4am Project took the opportunity of the fourth day of the fourth month to take an early morning photowalk, there was a look at what could be expected from the MAC reopening, International Dance Festival Birmingham got into gear and all sorts of events popped up in the CiB Shop.

The CiB Shop window was jazzed up with the help of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Art Detection Services set up their workshop in store and Shady Bird popped by to play a set. In other CiB news, CiBmail was launched.

The Rainbow announced their plans for developments and expansion both upstairs and below, we said goodbye to more independent record shops and sampad celebrated their 20th anniversary.

Trove showed some science, we had a nosey at CBSO’s summer programme and some behind the scenes footage from The Electric showed up.

Not My Type brought together “a veritable who’s who of Brum talent” (to quote myself) and, in other illustration-related news, the Love To Print crowd released Patterns #1.

Other things to look back on and go ‘oh yeah, I remember that’ include Such Tweet Sorrow, BAP’s document on Birmingham’s Creative Capital, the Big Culture Blog and a call for “more of the Simon Rattle effect”. Also, In Our Backyard looked interesting and Chris Bates made a video for Munchbreak’s Television:

There’s a lot of illustrators getting all collaborative at the moment, what with the Not My Type project and this here news about the new thing from the Love to Print collective. Katie from Supercool has explained things better than I would:

Patterns contains loads of exquisite illustrations from five fantastically talented screenprint artists, who each have very different styles – Karoline Rerrie, Sarah Lynch, Ruth Green, Helen Entwisle, Daisy Whitehouse – and yeah, I did some stuff too. (Though I can’t call myself an artist!)

Love to Print Patterns #1 will be available at The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Artists’ Bookfair on 22-23rd May. If you can’t make it there though, watch this space for other ways of getting your hands on Pattern

Her post has photos too.

Sarah Lynch is an illustrator and a member of the Love to Print collective, which is a project handily described on Shoulder to Crayon.

You can see some of Sarah’s ornithologically-inspired illustrations and screen prints on her blog.

Colour is the night run by Cib alumnus Katie Spragg and it returns to The Victoria on Thursday 15 October. Back in February (that long ago) they brought Charlie Parr along – there’s a video of him performing a fantastic version of ‘Cheap Wine‘.

This time round they’ve got a Commercially Inviable special starring World of Fox with support from James Summerfield, Friends of the Stars and Richard Burke.

Pixie Sixer’s already written all about it on More Canals Than Venice so check that for more info. I’m really posting this for an excuse to post Ruth Green‘s artwork for World of Fox.

Ruth is a recent addition to the Love to Print collective – a project explained on the rather wonderfully named Shoulder to Crayon. Most of that collective are also involved with Girls Who Draw, including Karoline Rerrie and Sarah Ray.

There seems to be quite a tangled web of ladies out there producing pretty, quirky illustrations. See also i heart joan and the Inkygoodness folks.