InvestIN Education

I’m a bit late getting round to this blog post, but never the less wanted to recognise it, as its something I’d like to get involved in again, or similar in future!

Towards the end of January I took part in a weekend event with InvestIN Education as a university graduate assistant, to assist with guiding young people, aged 16-19, with how to potentially navigate an education in creative subjects. The event had a few different University Graduates like myself from different specialties, and also a few speakers who are more established within their creative careers, that were leading talks throughout the day. Our role was to assistant students in small Zoom break-out rooms with creative activities, and help them navigate the software that came with these activities. This included drawing challenges, small critiques and directing and hosting their own virtual exhibition! This was done using the programmes Mural and Kunstmatrix.

It’s the first time I’ve engaged in an event like this along with the hosting responsibility, and I actually really enjoyed it! I think because it was focused in a genuine area of interest, I was able to engage with it almost effortlessly. Additionally, I felt I could easily relate it to activities as I had taken part in similar ones as student myself not too long ago, so I was able to guide the students through it with some experience and knowledge. 

In future I’d hope to get involved with similar projects and hopefully lead some talks and workshops myself, talking about my own practice! My university had a guest lecture most Fridays and I often really enjoyed them a felt they introduced me to the real world of illustration before I fully stepped into it myself.

Animal Kingdom - Pack of Cards

Even though I feel like I’ve been fairly productive over the last month and a half, my lack of blog post’s would prove otherwise… however this week I finally started a personal project which I’ve had the idea for, for over a year! Having always enjoyed card games, I’ve wanted to illustrate a pack of cards! I’ve seen plenty of artists do it, and love seeing how every approach is so unique and interesting. Of course, being me, the theme I’ve gone for is nature and animals, with hopefully each suite representing a different species. And I’m thinking to keep the colour pallet limited as my project Tonal Tropics was such as success, I also feel this makes it more suitable for an older audience as well as younger audiences.

Above shows the first 3 designs so far! They aren’t necessarily finished just yet, as I reckon I’ll find some things that need tweaked once I’ve got my head around the full pack. However I’m really happy with how they are looking so far, and they’ve had an amazing response on Instagram which is helping to encourage me to get more designs done. I already have all the animals I want to draw planned out, just need to get cracking.

In the long run… 52 designs later, I would absolutely love to see this sold as a pack in shops, so people can actually use them, and depending on how they turn out I’d consider a run of prints too. - As much as I love adapting my illustrations in to real life products that people can use, hosting my own shop and managing sales isn’t the part of my job that I’ve particularly enjoyed in the past. So I’m hoping to contact small retailers to sell them instead, and hopefully this will significantly increase my audience too! This will however, come with even more work of researching how to to go about doing it, so a pretty hefty project I’ve got on my hands, but an exciting one!

Where the Leaves Fall

Towards the end of 2020 I was commissioned by Where the Leaves Fall magazine to create an illustration to accompany an article by Jonny Keen. The text was so beautiful and descriptive, and focused on how nature will always prevail, so obviously right up my street! This weekend just gone I was treated with my copy of the magazine, and it was so lovely to see some work in print for the first time in quite a while! Grab your copy to see all the amazing contributions to issue #5.

Smoothie Packaging - JOOUCE

After loosing my mojo a little with my first packaging project I decided to change the direction by trying something different to see if it would get me more into the flow of things, and it did! I choose to make labels for a collection of bottled smoothies using repeat patterns of vibrant ingredient illustrations. Here are the end results.

I created 4 varieties of juice in order to give the full picture and explore a few possibilities without completely exhausting the idea. It required getting into the branding mindset which was difficult at times but I think a good challenge! It’s defiantly not a branding breakthrough but overall I’m very happy with the collection.

The back of pack was an additional challenge that required a little more research but I made sure to include all the essential info with a little extra targeted at young and sustainable audience using health incentives, fun language, and descriptive icons for environmental impact.

This project has made me realised how much I miss and benefited from the critiques that we had at university, I think especially when exploring a new area of design, its so important to gain feedback in-order to progress. I did however manage to gain a decent insight into packaging through a few video tutorials on Skillshare! I’m also struggling to know where to fit this project into my portfolio, I think I need a few more packaging/branding concepts at this point to give it more structure, so on to the next!