Tigerprint Gifted Competition 2013

Hey everyone! so I have been very busy recently working lots and spending time down in Plymouth for graduation so haven't been posting as much... sorry! Getting settled in now back home though so I will have more to show over the next few weeks.

For the past few years Tigerprint (who make greetings cards and gift wrap for M&S) have run a design competition for new graduates called "Gifted".

This year it ran over a whole month, each day had a new theme and you had to make a square design based on that theme. You could enter as many as you wanted but obviously the more variety you could show the more likely you were to win the prize which was a 3 month placement creating a range for Marks & Spencer.

I managed to create 13 designs and was selected as one of the commended winners (yay!) - you should check out the rest of this lot they have some lovely work :)

Anyhow, it seems like forever ago I did all of this work as it was back in July and I had to keep it secret until the end of the competition!

"Alphabet"

"Express Yourself"

"Back To Nature"

"Typographic"

"In Bloom"

"Freestyle"

"All About Colour"

"Make Your Mark"

"Spot"

"Summer"

I am hoping to release some of this work as prints and put some patterns on products soon. This may take a while as I am saving up to move out currently and working a lot but doing well in this comp is definitely motivating me to keep making stuff :)

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" ;)

So Many Projects!

The past week has been truly crazy! Since I got back from London I have been attempting to enjoy the sun whilst also improving my portfolio and working on new things in an attempt to secure any job that doesn't require me standing behind a till!

Tigerprint are running a daily design competition up until 26th July where you can enter as many designs as you want based on the themes they set each day. I have been working on all sorts from patterns and typography to greetings card designs. 

Because the final work might be used for M&S I can't show anything yet but here are a couple of previews of a couple of my drawings! 

I also signed myself up for the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search competition. The prize is representation by Lilla Rogers' agency for 2 years. I wanted to try my luck at the competition, even though I knew the standard would be very high and it would be unlikely I would get that far. After receiving the brief however, I scared myself a bit and avoided starting for way too long:

Consequently the deadline is today at 5pm, and I started my artwork design (which I thought up last night) at 10am. 

Note to self - do not leave things to the last minute it will leave you shaky and panicky whilst trying to Photoshop well and mean you make lots of mistakes and don't feel too great about the whole thing! 

The brief was to create a Journal cover imagining the client was Paperchase. The theme was vintage playgrounds and playground equipment and you could interpret this however you liked. It seems my new autopilot mode is to revert back to drawing circus performers after spending so long focusing on them for the Opticians artwork I did! Anyhow, I drew a girl reading a journal sat on a static trapeze/swing. 

Here is my final artwork as it was submitted :) for 4 hours of panicky drawing and Photoshop it came out better than I thought. It got to a point where my goal was not to get into the shortlist, but just to submit something that wasn't embarrassingly awful and I think I got there just about! 

Get Your Commercial Head On

I have spent the past four days doing a work placement at The Great British Card Company in Gloucester. All year I have had people asking what I will do when I finish this summer and the thought terrifies me so this was an opportunity to learn more about the commercial world of illustration and how I can make my work more sale-able!

I spent my time working with In house illustrators Carly and Simon who quickly showed me that I have no clue about what is considered "commercial" by the general public... With their help I managed to create a range of cards with careful consideration about how to make them appealing to the masses whilst also still using my strengths and my own personal style.

It was a definite learning curve, and even if I don't go into this industry I feel a lot more knowledgable about commercial card design and the range of skills used. I also got to play around with the foiling machine and flitter (glitter) to add extra bits to my cards. However cringy and girly it sounds I did love doing it! (and the glitter is still all over me...) 

In the end I managed to make 4 card designs and 6 gift wrap designs, heres a few samples! The balloon is my favourite, hoping to make a couple of cards to go with that one, my eyes started to blur today from too much Photoshop so I didn't get to finish it. 

These both have glitter and foil but it is pretty impossible to photograph well...

Ballooooons!