Pattern Hunting in Guildford

So last year, after a weeks placement at The Great British Card Company, I was told I would never look at greetings cards the same way. They said that every time I go into a shop I would pay much more attention to the designs and styles on the shelves. 

This is definitely true, and it goes further than just greetings cards, I now find myself noticing packaging design, home ware, wrapping paper, clothing patterns, and anything else that involves beautiful design in shops.

I met up with my illustrator friend Jess in Guildford for some shopping, and we decided to go pattern hunting in a number of shops - it was a very successful mission and I documented our finds here for your perusal and inspiration. I always find looking at a number of beautiful designs can help me get started when I am stuck for ideas :)

Let me know what you think of these!

I also highly recommend The Tea Terrace at the top of House of Fraser in Guildford - they have a beautiful garden outside (shame it was cloudy) and gorgeous vintage style cups and saucers. The people next to us had tea in these elephant teapots which you could also buy from the counter!

Christmas Fayre Poster - Hand Drawn Type

I have seen a lot of beautiful posters about recently using hand drawn type mixed with illustration to give a more "hand made" style to the events they are advertising. This works especially well when it comes to advertising craft fayres as the whole premise behind these events is buying into hand crafted goods. I find hand drawn typography to be a lot more charming and interesting to look at than standard fonts. 

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I have wanted to make a poster like this for a while now so I jumped at the opportunity to help out a friend who is running a christmas craft fayre in Chippenham to raise money for a local charity on 21st December. Check out the event page here.

I thought I would go into a bit about my process when it comes to hand drawn type. I usually loosely sketch out a composition of what my piece of work will look like. I am no graphics/layout expert but generally just looking at the shapes of different letters and words and seeing how they fit around each other helps when working out a composition.

To come up with the different type styles I usually use dafont.com where I will look at a variety of fonts before choosing one and experimenting with drawing it out in my own style with different drawing implements. It usually ends up with the text being a hybrid of the chosen font and my own style due to the different tools I use. 

One tip I have for hand drawn type is to experiment a lot with your tools. I prefer my designs to have different line weights and textures as I think it looks richer and more interesting. This is a small selection of what I use for type:

 Left to right: Berol Italic Pen, Rotring Mechanical pencil, 3 Rotring Rapidograph pens of various weight, Graphite pencil, Graphite stick, Alex Wonder Pen (alternative to brush pens, click for how to make), Calligraphy Fountain Pen. 

Graphite sticks for example have a really great grainy texture and chunky ones can easily be manipulated to create different thicknesses of line.

These presents are drawn with 3 different thicknesses of fineliner.

For this I drew out my design roughly in the chosen fonts in pencil before going over with various types of pen/graphite pencils. Here is the scan of the finished design:

I then went into Photoshop to tweak the composition, retouch because am not the neatest of artists, and add colour and layers of texture. Here is the final result:

I enjoyed this project, hoping I can do more like this in the future! Feel free to share your own hand drawn type projects, I love to see what people are working on :)

Templar Publishing Paper Watch Project

Today I have been working on something for a charity project run by Templar Publishing. As part of a bid to raise £5000 for Breast Cancer Care they have asked various illustrators to decorate a paper watch to be sold at auction. 

I set about doing some sketches for ideas

I decided to add colour using some metallic embellishment pens which have a 3D effect on the paper

Before moving onto my final watch:

I added an extra bit because the flowers weren't big enough on the watch face ;) 

You can see some images of the other watches over here on their facebook page! 

Giftware Inspiration

This past week I had some time off of work and have been all around the country, visiting some uni friends in Plymouth, family in Cornwall and then up to Birmingham today for the Autumn Fair trade show! This post is just a few photos of some of the lovely things I stumbled upon!

I went with my family to Port Isaac, a seaside town in Cornwall where they film the programme "Doc Martin" (if you like random trivia). There were loads of gorgeous little gift shops including a pottery gallery in this amazing building:

Where you could look down over from the top level into the space below. They had some amazing hand painted pottery.

There were also loads of beautiful gifts and decorations:

And today I went to Birmingham for my first ever trade show (as a visitor rather than exhibiting) to see what it was all about and get inspired by other peoples work.

The NEC in Birmingham is a huuge place, there were 5 halls filled with all sorts of commercial goods, mainly types of giftware, greetings and homeware. I stumbled upon some fun things, and we also watched a popcorn making demonstration and found a dinosaur! 

All in all a very fun day with too many amazing things to see and take in at once, some beautiful displays with varying levels of sparkliness and lights, suck uk was quite extreme:

T-rex!

Dancing sandyclaws!!!

Oh and a little inspiration for any fellow graduates who are freaking out about life right now, if this is too cringy just imagine Dory from Finding Nemo "just keep swimming" ;)

birds birds birds

All i have done all day is sit at my desk and do some good (and some awful) bird drawings. Looked through my box of art materials and found all sorts of textured papers and inks and paints that have sat in there since the summer :)