Great British Summer Inspiration

So I have been inspired this week by the beautiful packaging Kate Larsen has been designing for M&S's "Great British Summer" range. 

Her designs are being used on a wide range of snacks, cakes, desserts and food featuring scenes of the british summertime including hot air balloons, beaches, fairgrounds and beach huts.

The illustrations are super beautiful, and I love the way she has incorporated food into them, biscuits riding a ferris wheel etc.

I got a little inspired and made this colour palette to work from and create some "Great British Summer" themed patterns: 

Also I downloaded an action for rounding corners on images which makes them look swish and also hopefully harder to steal (; 

Let me know what you think! Has anyone else been inspired by any packaging/artwork they have seen recently?

The All Purpose Magical Tent

As part of one of our university modules this years we had to take part in competitions and other projects outside of uni. One of the projects a few of us decided to do was a "Twitter Narrative" project called "The All Purpose Magical Tent", the brainchild of poet Lytton Smith. 

The project runs across five twitter accounts, each account representing one character including The Ringmaster, The Bearded Lady, The Lion Tamer, The Tightrope Walker and The Carousel Attendant. We were put into teams and assigned different characters to illustrate tweets for. The tweets are lines of poetry which occasionally link between the different characters and are being slowly released over the course of two weeks. 

To check out the project in its entirety click here to go to the main website, this also has links to the individual accounts so you can follow them on twitter!

I was part of the Bearded Lady team along with Paolo Fiore and Sophia Viney. Here are a few of my images:

"It is always at the outset a displacement—[the monster] is fragment, obscured glance"

"The hybrid wildlife of irises visible in the foliage. Language, we are moving on again."

"what our solitude requires, that it removes the body. Do you dare imagine the anchoress laying a hand on her own ... "

"Am suspicion, boneshard, one town over, footprint or silhouette at the Gates of Difference, wait for their unlocking"

The style was pretty dark for this but I quite enjoyed it after doing lots of brightly coloured things for a while!

These are some of the other people images by people involved in the project:

Sophia Viney

Paolo Fiore

Katie Keith

Luke Gill

Jamie Bradford

Alistair Nimmo

Abby Regler

Ben Morgan

Jordan Rogers

Paddy Smith

Claire Adele

(plym students reading this - as people have worked in different styles there are a few images I wasn't sure of the artist so please link me one of yours and I will add it in!)

Tigerprint female pattern

So last night I submitted designs to Tigerprint's monthly design competition. This months theme is "female surface pattern", the brief being fairly open, asking designers to re-invent female pattern, thinking outside the box and using designs which steer away from the obvious flower designs you see everywhere.

I have been using the Ipad app "IOrnament" a lot recently to draw my own digital designs. It takes a lot of the work out of figuring out repeats and the more I use it, the more I see how much you can do with it. Once you have drawn your pattern, you can see what that drawing looks like in different repeat styles, and you can then Email the tile to yourself to use in Photoshop as a pattern.

For this competition I opened the tiles I wanted in Photoshop and tweaked the colours, saturation etc. before submitting them to the competition!

I have also put some of the designs on Society6 if you fancy a cushion or phone cover, check them out in my shop here.