Autumn Clutter City and Winter craft market preparations.

On September 28th, I took part in the Autumn edition of Clutter City, a local craft market held at Norwich Arts Centre. It was a fab day, and I met some lovely people, Including the super-talented Kellee Rich, and Deerly Beloved Bakery, with their tasty cakes. 

I took along a fair bit of new stock: a good few of my new little notebooks, - Mushrooms designs and Norwich themed ones - as well as a new, improved stand setup.

For a couple of weeks beforehand, I'd been preparing some screenprints of my Norwich Illustrated map down at the Stew gallery and print rooms. It's the first time in about 7 years I've done any proper  screen printing. I had a brilliant time, and learned a lot. I'm definitely going to go back and do some more work down at Stew. It's a brilliant resource for local artists and printmakers.

I've also been accepted for several local craft markets in the run up to christmas. 

• Sat 26th Oct - Pottergate Crafts - Rackheath Holy Trinity 

• Sun 17th Nov - Pottergate Crafts - Costessey Centre

• Sat 23th Nov - Thorpe Christmas Fair

• Fri 6th Dec - Castle craft fair

• Sat 7th Dec - Norwich Makers 

• Sun 15th Dec - Pottergate Crafts - Costessey Centre

The Courtyard garden centre cafe is also stocking a selection of my earrings too. 

I'm currently working on some new stock, and should have some new screenprints, cards, notebooks and earrings for sale soon.

'Yesterday's World' Map - Behind the scenes.

Earlier this year, I was approached by the lovely chaps at Creative Sign Co. to produce a visitor map of 'Yesterday's World' - an attraction/museum based in the sunny seaside town of Gt Yarmouth. It's a fab collection, showcasing old packaging, tradesman's tools and lots of other weird and wonderful objects. They have a great display of old cameras and even an apothecary too.

Now the project is all finished, I thought it would be nice to share some of the process here.

After a couple of site visits, conversations and hundreds of reference photos, I got to work sketching out a plan of the building, the rooms and areas both upstairs and down, onto squared paper.

Once both floors were planned out, with everything lining up, I transferred the drawing onto isometric paper, where I started working upwards, plotting in the walls and walkways and making sure the map was clear and easy to read. 

I altered the plan on both floors to accommodate the 3D nature of the map, ensuring all areas could still be seen. Once the detail was all roughed in, I scanned it and dropped the drawing into a rough indesign layout and sent it off for approval.

After a couple of inevitable tweaks, I was able to start inking up the final drawing. Using the lightbox I traced over the rough in ink, with crisp lines, adding in more detail as I went. Once inked the drawing was ready to be scanned again, imported into photoshop and coloured up digitally.

For the colouring, I used solid colour layers with vector masks for each of the large areas - the floor, walls etc. This makes the colours far easier to alter once it's all coloured up. When the base colours are all down, I started painting in the detail, shading etc and when finally happy with it, I dropped it into the indesign layout again, and sent it off to the client for approval.

Once approved, I made the file 'print ready' and sent it off to the client.

It's brilliant seeing the illustrations you've worked on in their final environment, in this case, printed as 2x massive panels, to be placed both inside and outside of the attraction, as well as on a printed map and as a downloadable file from their website. This was one of my favourite jobs so far and I had a lot of fun and learned a lot whilst doing it.

The final project can be seen over in my Behance portfolio HERE