Fishes!

I've recently screen-printed a batch of these fishy/whaley guys and made them into long pillows. They are in my etsy shop right now! 

MATS: Round 2, Staffordshire.

For the Make Art That Sells Round 2, the assignment was to look at Staffordshire Pottery, like these guys above, which I found in an Antique shop one Saturday. Staffordshire Pottery is lots of hand painted lions, zebras, sheep, people, cats and dogs, with funny but endearing expressions and lots of lovely motifs on them. My Nana tells me that they 'aren't fashionable anymore' when I told her I now want to collect all the funny dogs I possibly can. They are quirky and fun and something that I never considered drawing before, but that's the point of Make Art That Sells - it forces you to look at new subject matters beyond your normal gaze. I thought I'd share some early sketchbook studies with you - some are rough, most are just playing around. I started to use a brush pen more and added colour with crayons. I also got some new gouache for Christmas, 

so experimented and played with them too.

I LOVED drawing Staffordshire Pottery so much! The aim of the assignment was to have designs for plates based on the characters and motifs. Here is my final submission for it:

What I liked the most, though was the characters that I drew in my sketchbook... and I wanted to use them in another way for my shop and myself. Thinking about this, after work one day some work colleagues and I went Riso-Printing at Dizzy Ink in Nottingham. We were making a risograph printed zine in a few hours and thinking about a theme so that we could all design a section and then bind it together as a long concertina book. One of my colleagues had brought in photographs from her childhood, old houses and shops she'd visited in Staffordshire where she was from, 

sooo, I happily started drawing some of my characters to form a Staffordshire zine! 

Here are the layers being drawn up: 

 ..and the final print (my part of the book) is pictured below. I loved Risograph! 

But that is another blogpost, for another day!

Cats and funny-faced dogs on the mind, I decided to re-draw my favorite characters and add in a few more to make a repeat pattern which I intend to screen-print this week on to fabric and make some cushions and maybe even some plush Staffordshire characters to test the water in my shop. 

I'll post and share the material once it's printed! But above is a sneaky peak - I wanted the characters to look funny and weird and not really match! I think some of them 

will look really good as plush toys - I'll let you know how it goes. 

Clifford & the Cloud of Fear.

I am currently laying out my portfolio for various jobs, and revisiting old work and I thought that I hadn't put on my blog. Here are some illustrations from a book I made during my MA in 2012, called 'Clifford and the Cloud of Fear'. It's a story about a boy called Clifford who likes dressing up as a beaver. It's a heavily illustrated book with a moral message about consumerism. 

Aloe Magazine

 Everyone loves plants at the moment, right? They do make me happy, although I am not the most green-fingered of them all, hence the invention of the Knitted Cacti range that I hope brings joy into the lives of fellow plant lovers but unfortunate plant killers. Last year, I was asked to produce some plant-y patterns for a lovely magazine called Aloe, made in Huddersfield (more pictured below). I just got my hands on it and wanted to share the work with you: 

Fish n Chips n 20:20

 

 At the Leeds College of Art, where I run a Portfolio Development class on a Saturday, I am part of a print collective called The Short Print collective! I forgot to share this last year - I took part in 20:20 which is a yearly print exhibition/swop where you produce 25 prints 20cm by 20cm. You send them out and receive a box with 25 prints in ! It's fab. At the time, I was drawing lots of fish, so I decided to screen-print a fish n chip print. Above is the positive, ready to print and below are the stacks of prints, ready to be sent, all wrapped (as fish and chips are) in newsprint.

Make Art That Sells 1

As promised, here is my first Make Art That Sells (MATS) assignment outcome. 

The brief was to produce a design for bolt fabric under the theme 'vintage kitchen' 

based on observational drawings of pasta and Pyrex style dishes:

This was my first attempt and I took a week to step back from it and re-address it, something wasn't quite right. I did like the icons and the energy of the design - when I made it as a repeat it looked fun - but I felt that overall it was a bit cluttered and too many colours (even though I do like it!) so I decided to make some cut outs and add texture to them using printing ink and scan them in to create a 'mono-printed' effect. I wanted the shapes to be stronger, more refined and their to be delicious textures in the design: 

The colours I was restricted to in the printing inks determined the overall scheme. Although I did mix the colours to a vintage palette which I had previously decided - I wasn't distracted by the millions of possibilities that you have on photoshop or illustrator, which helped me a lot! Here is the final version: 

I particularly like the coordinates at the bottom! I might get it printed on to fabric and whip up a purse or something kitchen-y for my portfolio. Had a great time doing this Make Art That Sells assignment - although I didn't think it would take me as long as it did to complete the first one. Shows that I need to work harder and faster since spending two years writing and researching... but I'm happy with this outcome now and ready to start assignment 2! 

2015!

Goodbye 2015! Hope you all gave it a good send off and had a good year. For me, looking back, it's been a fine old year. Maybe I'll even look back and call it a vintage year. I completed my PGDIPE (and got a 1st!). It was hard at times, but rewarding to challenge myself academically with reading and writing. I also got FHEA status which is cool. So happy that now all my spare time can be spent making instead of writing assignments. I also ran my first (last? maybe!) marathon this year! I spent a lot of time training and spending so many Saturday nights hydrating and carbing-up and then off I went for a three - four hour run on Sundays. Phew! I completed it at the end of November in beautiful Florence, Italy and it felt AMAZING. 

So, despite all the time I felt had been taken up by pushing myself mentally and physically last year, I was pleasantly surprised that my best nine on instagram was lots of creations!

Lots of plants too. Knitted Cacti, patterns, notebooks. Most of this is available in my etsy shop right now if you fancy having a browse! Foot is on the accelerator this year. One Christmas present I received in 2015 was the Make Art That Sells course by Lilla Rogers which I'm loving! I'll post my creations from that as I make them, but so far it's really inspiring and such a great thing for me to get back into creating and making post-pgdipe and marathon training, which has just taken up all my time. I've been busy still though! Printing new characters to make homewares and new items over the next few months. I will blog about these later on, but here, have a glimpse of a few things to come: