Christmas at M&S

Last month I mentioned that I had spotted my designs for Marks and Spencer in store, which you can see here. Here are a couple more that have been added since, available online and instore:

Christmas Crackers with my snowflake design in silver and white:

And my traditional foliage Christmas Card design:

I'm working on designs for Christmas 2011 right now. It really gets me in the mood for the christmas hols, I do like this time of year!

Christmas Cards with a personal touch

Following on from my post about my Christmas cards in M&S, I must also mention that my Christmas designs for Ballistic Blue are also now available. These designs are available to personalise and also add an optional photograph so really are a lovely personal Xmas greeting, especially to distant family and friends.

It's really easy to navigate their site and upload a photo and add names and a message.

They would also work well as corporate cards with a staff or product photo.

You may recognise some designs from here. I spent some time reformatting them for personalising front and inside; I think they'll work really well.

And for New Year parties!

Xmas (in September!?)

Under usual circumstances I would be dismayed to see Christmas products in store mid September... I thought it was the done thing to wait until after Halloween? I guess the summer has well and truly gone!

Anyway, I will make an exception this year because I've just spotted some of my designs in Marks and Spencer (in store and online) and that put a smile on my face!

Contemporary Trees and Traditional Scene multipacks:

Holographic and metallic wrap and matching tags:

You may be able to spot my snowflake design on the silver bags in the "shopfront" picture on M&S's website:

 

A hubby Christmas card, with embellished detail:

And to be REALLY organised, a sparkly Happy New Year card with glitter!

That's it for now, more to come later.

I hope you like my designs - and forgive me for talking about Christmas in September!

Tigerprint Christmas Typography Comp...

This week I had on my to-do-list to enter the Tigerprint competition. I haven't entered as frequently as I used to which is silly coz however busy (or not) I may be I always enjoy tackling their briefs. Also, the designs can always come in handy to re-use when (if) I don't win!

Last minute my eleventh hour entries are in. I do like designing for xmas greetings and the Typography theme was a lovely challenge, a new way to look at a thoroughly designed season!

The brief was to design a card exploring Christmas Typography as the theme, and also as it's an online card it has to have editable, personalised text and/or room to upload a photo... oh and has to work on a range of scales from a small thumbnail to a large size printed card. Keeping to a simple, contemporary colour palette I created my "let it snow" design from random "falling" snowflakes forming the letters by using negative and positive space. I enjoyed creating this one; adding the snowflakes practically one at a time... time consuming but very theraputic at the same time!
For the "Christmas Tree" and "Let's Make Merry Wreath" designs I chose a decorative font and manipulated it to fit together in a christmassy papercut style. Reminiscent of cutting paper snowflakes.

The wreath would frame an uploaded photo really delicately, perhaps inside the card?

Finally, a more fun and informal romantic Xmas greeting with "Note to Santa"!

A couple of my new blogging and twitter buddies, and previous Tigerprint Comp winners, have blogged their entries to the Tigerprint Competition too... have a look at Elizabeth Ryman, Helen Pickup, and other regulars Marlene Leibowitz and Bess Harding's entries.

Live Owl and Me!

I got to hold a live Eagle Owl at the Leeds Owl Trail anniversary party yesterday evening... a little nerve wrecking as close up you realise what powerful animals they can be.

She came (with her handler) from the Royal Armouries in Leeds as our guest of honour!

This fella is less intimidating though, a little Leeds Owl Trail mascot with a t-shirt made-to-measure very kindly and expertly by Karen at Blueberry Park then I added my Leeds Owl Trail logo.Looks quite good I think!

We had a great full-page write up in the Yorkshire Evening Post, a smaller version is online here; which was a great follow up to the one on the BBC website.

The article in the paper followed a week of school and Art Gallery workshops devised and delivered by the Owl Team, culminating in an exhibition of little owls placed on the map in Leeds Museum.

(picture of clay owls by Nick Moss Films)

On top of my busy time with the Leeds Owl Trail I'm also working on Christmas greetings designs for 2011 and bespoke Halloween invitations for October.

Variety makes makes my job such fun!

Cutting and Sticking

I work in a variety of media; I enjoy drawing, vector illustration, digital painting, real life painting etc... but one of my styles that I developed during my degree (at Glasgow School of Art) is a collage style that I think is quite individual.

I colour and cut papers and layer them up before photographing them. My first piece was an illustration of a Ceilidh for the front cover of the Big Issue. I then had a lovely commission for The Scottish Ballet where I observed and sketched the dancers at rehearsals and studied their costumes to create several pieces of work for their calendar and exhibition.

I also have had work published in this style by Paperchase, in Elle magazine, as greetings cards, wall art, book covers and corporate illustration.

Most recently I have revisited this technique for Tigerprint, creating traditional style Christmas cards (under wraps until Xmas 2010!). Fashions come and go and a commercial artist has to evolve to be successful. I don't know whether it's because paper cutting is becoming more in demand (thanks to the likes of Mr Rob Ryan... and have you seen Jayme Mcgowan and Peter Callesen?) or whether this way of working contrasts to current trends, but it's really nice to get the ink rollers and scalpel out again!