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!

20 Ways To Draw A Tree

I got this book for christmas and rediscovered it recently when clearing out my book shelf. It is a sketchbook with a difference, combining space for drawing with a huge number of drawings for inspiration. 

The front cover is made of matte texturised paper which makes me feel artsy for a start.

Each page consists of a different "thing" to be drawn from nature, there is a huge range from acorns to snowflakes, stars, mushrooms and feathers. 

They are all laid out slightly differently but the pages always have around 20 drawings of each thing, and space for you to add your own drawings. 

This is a great book for people who like drawing nature. I especially like it as pattern designers like me can use these small drawings as the basis for repeat patterns. 

Here are some ferns I drew on one page - it does feel strange being "allowed" to draw in this book.

The illustrator Eloise Renouf has put some truly beautiful artwork in this book with a wide variety of different colours, textures and styles to really get you inspired and motivated to draw. Even if you aren't into drawing it is a gorgeous book to own and have a flick through.

You can check out Eloise's website here and this book can be purchases from amazon here along with a number of other "20 ways to draw" books by different artists. What do you guys think of this book? Any other sketchbooks you can recommend?

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!

Eden Project Flower Studies

I went for a short break to Cornwall last week with the boyfriend. Since I he has never been to The Eden Project and I haven't been for years, we decided to take a day trip in the hopes we could see some nice wildlife and get away from the great british weather which basically has so far consisted of vast amounts of flooding! 

We were very lucky with the weather, it was cold but dry and quite sunny, when we were in the biomes we sat for a while and pretended we were in another country as it was lovely and warm! Definitely in need of a real holiday I think...

Here are some of the awesome things we saw whilst walking around:

Birds with furry heads

Flowers with furry heads

A hot air balloon

Some epic metal sculptures

And of course many, many flowers! I was feeling a little down the other day having not done any drawing for a good while and looking through these photos motivated me so I sat and had a little sketching session:

I used rotring rapidograph pens with 3 different nibs to create depth in the drawings by varying line thickness. Hoping to edit these and maybe put them together for a print or something when I get motivated to scan some things :)