Glicée prints now available with the National Park Print Shop

I’m super stoked to share that a bunch of my illustrations are now available as glicée prints up to A1 with National Park Print Shop, alongside lots of other amazing nature themed artworks!!! 🌿

This is super exciting for me because, the vast majority of my work was designed to be printed as big as possible, in order to capture all the details, and I currently don’t have the capacity to do this at home, in terms of printing but also storing and framing large artworks. So when I saw the opportunity arise to partner with National Park Print Shop, I jumped at it!

For now we’ve stocked the full Tonal Tropics collection, all of Urban Eden, and 4 of the most popular designs from Animal Kingdom. Check out my page on the website to see all 12 available prints. There’s a choice of black, white and wooden frames options too!

Travels and Procreate Practice

Last week I got back from a trip of a life time, I visited Rio, Brazil during carnival season! My holiday was full of inspiring experiences that I hope to never forget, and I created 2 illustrations to try and capture just a smidge of that! 

I went with the hopes to create a 2nd edition to my 2019 project ‘Views from Carnival’, however that didn’t quite go to plan… my phone was stolen during a bloco, so I wasn’t able to capture reference pictures which are very essential in my practice. Not all is lost, because I still have all of my photos from earlier on in the trip backed up, enabling me to capture some calmer moments of typical Rio streets featuring street art, lush greenery, and overcrowded electrical lines.

Both illustration are quite a bit more sketchier than my usual work, but I actually preferred not obsessing over the imperfections for this particular project, as it’s just for me rather than a client! They were also completed far quicker than my normal rate, and allowed me to continue to practice and grow my skills with Procreate. With each additional drawing, I’m feeling more confident in transitioning between Wacom and Ipad, I’ve now even used Procreate to start a few commissioned projects, and then later transitioned onto Photoshop as the image progresses. The whole purpose of buying an iPad was to allow myself to illustrate on the go, so I’m really happy with travel opportunities like this to do exactly that!

I would have liked to draw a third illustration, as we know how much I love a collection, but alas I have lots of deadlines to meet soon so should really be prioritising that for now… maybe I’ll come back to this project, but probably not.

2022 Review

2022 has been and amazing year of growth and also variety within my artistic venture and I’m super proud of all my achievements and lessons learnt!

My main focus this year was to work on my shop. I re-opened my online store last November after finally purchasing my own industry standard printer to have at home, making it way easier to provide prints of my art-work on a small but immediate scale. Since then, I’ve created new and more diverse products including canvas tote bags, stickers and A2 prints! I also worked on widening my audience online by creating more video content on social media and attracting new eyes from around the world through Etsy. I also grew my audience a smaller more local scale, by partnering with a few independent shops in Bristol and Wales, and hosting around 25 market stalls all around Bristol and Bath! Each new experience was a learning curve and a big risk. New products often mean investing quite a bit of money and time with no guaranteed reward. Some markets I came home at a loss from stall fees and travel costs. Preparing stock for shops and markets would have me over-stretched, working on printing and packaging until the early hours of the morning. However, I subsequently then had the most successful sales during the months of October and November, and by this stage I’d made my market set up process pretty seamless and worked out what locations and selling techniques work best for me!

In 2023 I’ll be taking a small step-back from the focus of my store, my plan is to host just 1 market a month, with organisers that I know work well for me, and I won’t be making any new products at-least until the 2nd half of the year in the lead up to Christmas.

Outside of the growth of my shop there’s a few major achievements that I’m incredibly proud of. First and foremost being that I illustrated an entire book! Although quite a normal expected outcome of an illustrator, illustrating a book, specifically for a young audience, has always been out of my comfort zone. It’s not something I would agree to without a lot of consideration, but when I was pitched with the beautiful plot, I couldn’t say no, and in June The Life of Stevie Smortberry was released and available to buy in leading bookstores!

Back within my usual comfort zone of editorial illustrations, I created work within tight deadlines for The Big Issue and Elle Decoration, both big names that I’m super chuffed with! I also completed a dream project of the complex descriptive modern tapestry type illustration, which was printed onto a hand held concertina as well as used digitally on an interactive website!

In 2023, I want to shift back into creating more descriptive narrative work. Despite being very challenging at times, it’s something I really enjoy, and fortunately I already have 2 major projects lined up for the new year! I also want to experiment more with my iPad, see what I can do with Procreate and capture moments on the go when traveling!

Christmas Commissions

Along with mass amount of market stalls and last minute deliveries I had to organise, I somehow managed to squeeze a few gift commissions into last few weeks leading up to Christmas. Each presented their own challenges but overall I’m super happy with the final outcomes, and I’m pretty sure the receivers of the illustration prints were too!

Both dog portraits were completed using solely Procreate on my new iPad, rather than Photoshop on my familiar Wacom Cintiq. I finally got my hands on my own iPad a few months ago, so I’m mildly embarrassed to say it’s not until now that I actually completed an illustration from start to finish using it. In all fairness, I’ve been very busy, and after around 6 or 7 years of using a Wacom Cintiq for 99% of my work, I’ve become a little stuck in my ways, but I’m hoping to make much more use of the iPad in the new year!