Knotting Hill Carnival

Throwing it back to this time last year when I worked as an in-house illustrator at the jewellery brand KIONII and we worked on possibly our funnest campaign to date, Knotting Hill Carnival! My illustrations were made for social media posts, a customer card, a website banner and a playlist cover!

Despite Carnival being cancelled that year because of COVID, it was still so much fun. I was given so much creative freedom and previously worked on a self-directed project around Knotting Hill Carnival so I was keen to give it another go with a slight change in perspective. This included creating a classy Knotting Hill interior showcasing many of the country pendants, as well as a more raunchy crop of a carnival outfit featuring different Caribbean flags as nail art.

The aim of the campaign was great fun as the whole team got involved in the festivities with contributions to the playlist, blog posts with traditional recipes and interactive polls over on our Instagram page to get our audience involved. It’s definitely a topic i know I’ll revisit soon!

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Pack of cards milestone #1

After a long break from my playing card project, thanks to a few tiny obstacles that led to me completely loosing motivation, I made some great progress recently and I’m so happy to finally be able to share all the final picture cards!!! I was getting so worked up over the colour pallets and wanted each to be consistent with the other and I’m so glad I put this extra time in even if it meant a lot of back and forth because now seeing them all together, it appears to have really paid off! I love how they all look side by side.

I still have to do all the number cards, the backs and the box so I’m not even half way there, regardless it’s so nice to celebrate this mini milestone and it’s definitely given me a good motivational boost!

In an ideal world I’d love to have the cards finished, printed and ready to be packaged by October to make the most of Christmas sales boost, however I feel this is pretty unlikely with all else that I’ve got going on at the moment. I also have no idea how long production will actually take, so if I want to make this dream even partially possible I should really crack on… I’m hoping the number cards will be far quicker and simpler to finish than the kings, queens and jacks, anyway watch this space!

A fun animation showing all the individual cards can be see on my Instagram!

Good to be inspired again

This week I went to my first gig in well over a year. It felt so so so good to be out again in the real world hearing artists put their all into their work and being surrounded by people who are all there for the same reason, to listen to music and have fun.

Live music has always been a big part of my life, so it makes perfect sense to have felt so lost without it in the last year. Although my illustration work isn’t always centred around music it’s definitely a theme I enjoy exploring and a good night out can really rejuvenate and inspire me even if what I’m working on isn’t at all related. After my gig on Wednesday I felt SO inspired, just by being in the physical environment where the magic happens! So I decided to draw it. It’s not to the same super detailed complexity of my usual work, but it was nice just to draw something because I wanted to. I really enjoyed being quite loose and playful with it, especially thanks to the coloured lighting. I also captured a fun time-lapse screen recording condensing 4 hours into 1 minute, watch it on my instagram, linked here!