It’s been a busy few weeks!

I’ve had my head down the last few weeks. A friend and I are starting up a small T shirt brand and I’ve been concentrating on that. We’ve been bouncing ideas back and forth (well more that she’s been reining in my ideas to something workable) and getting inspired from each others enthusiasm for the project. I’ve been designing T shirts and being creative, but the hardest part has been agreeing on a name. Helen likes my surname, feeling that it sounds very english and classy (ha!) and after months of backwards and forwards, suggesting words from an assortment of different languages ranging from French to Spanish and Latin to Hawaiian, we have come full circle and are back to using my name again…

I’ll be documenting our progress with the project and showing all the new designs as they are developing. We are trying out lots of different techniques to achieve the look we want on a budget to start off small, so the whole thing will be a huge learning curve.

It’s exciting times!

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Paper V Pad

I was talking to someone yesterday about the digital portfolios and old school physical ones. I’ll be honest, I really don’t miss dragging one of those big black leather portfolios around with me, but I do miss having something tactile to show. I’ve been at this designing lark for so long, i used to paint prints in gouache and colour my fashion illustrations with pantone pens. I miss the slight smell of spray mount (god knows i don’t miss spray booths and slightly crunchy arms from a day of cutting out and mounting boards), mixed with pantone and new plastic insert sleeves. I even miss those annoying black paper sheets that you could never get back in if you took them all the way out.

Afterwards I had a look through some of my really old work, stuff I did in watercolour paints for Esprit Baby, how I miss all that! Then there was scribbling onto tipex sheets to get texture and oil pastels and metallic gold pens.

Maybe it’s time to step away from photoshop, get some back to basics, produce work that is great because of it’s blemishes, it’s happy accidents, not it’s perfection.