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!

The Girl and the Bird

My course leader Ashley Potter from Plymouth University has been running a project to investigate how different people tackle illustration work and how this may relate to their personalities. 

The project was entitled "Girl & Bird" this subject has been tackled many times in the past in all different ways and we were asked to interpret it however we liked, and then answer a questionnaire about our work which involved questions about ourselves, the work we did and about our personality types. 

I used this project as an opportunity to do a "real" illustration project, after months away from university I have found myself spending much less time on research and drawing development in the work I do and I wanted to push myself further in this one to try and create something exciting.

I used Pinterest to collect a variety of images to inspire me. Since I started learning aerial hoop I have been collecting different poses to motivate myself and I found myself drawn to the idea of including this in my work for this project as the grace and elegance of aerial artists posing in hoops reminds me of birds sat on branches. 

The first aerial girls I drew were ok, I found myself reverting back to the style I used when drawing the circus characters for my final year project. Whilst the facial expressions for that worked well, I wanted this girl to look less juvenile and more sophisticated.

After researching pierrot makeup and fashion illustrations I spent a while experimenting with different face styles in the drawings shown below. 

I much preferred these to the simplistic expressions I used to use and decided to carry this as a theme within the bird character. My first birds were fun, but rather fat :

I developed these using longer, curvier lines and more sophisticated faces, I wanted them to look more like birds of paradise.

For my final piece I chose a hanging pose for the girl on the hoop as I really liked the pose, I decided to use textured watercolour paper as it gave the line work a rougher style.

After scanning the drawing in I coloured it using Photoshop, I chose a palette of bright, fun colours to fit the fantastical theme, I was very happy with it and I hope to put prints online soon!

Glass Dip Pens and Kelmscott Manor

Last wednesday I went for a day out to Kelmscott manor with my mum. Kelmscott was the home of british designer William Morris for many years, after writing my dissertation on his work I have a bit of an obsession, unfortunately you weren't allowed to take photographs inside the house but you can see some of his work from when I visited the William Morris Museum in London here.

It was a lovely sunny day so we wandered around the gardens and I got some photos of the autumn leaves - such lovely colours!

We had a timed entrance so had a look around the gift shop before we went in, you could buy almost anything in some kind of Morris print.

My mum bought me an early birthday present, a venetian glass dip pen and ink set which is absolutely beautiful! 

It holds the ink in the ridges in the glass and it flows really nicely, I haven't used ink in ages so I did a few doodles.

Shapes and flowers collection

Yay new work! 

I have been working a lot recently (at my "normal" job) but I get two half hour breaks so have been doing doodles in the staff room when I have the energy! 

I used this colour palette from my previous blog post because I like the range of different colours and wanted to branch out from always using shades of purple and blue (yes there is still purple but I pretty much never use red, yellow, or brown. shh...)

These four are based around different shapes, the two below are focused on natural forms and using the brighter colours to make the linework pop. 

I would love to know your thoughts on these and if there are any products you would like to see them on? I am thinking of making some coasters and mugs when I get the right materials in :)