My First Stall Experience

I looked into local events around Bedford in hope to try and start selling my designs and cards. I used to do car boots with my parents when I was a kid but nothing like selling handmade crafts. It was the Wootton Fun Festival and it was a mixture of stalls from crafts, cakes and tombolas. 

It probably wasn't the best place to start as it seemed like a fun, cheap event and my products are slightly more expensive than an average village fete. About 3 hours went by with no luck but eventually I ended up selling £19 worth of cards. I had many people comment on how beautiful my paintings were and also a few people comment that they looked printed. I guess people assumed I just printed out some designs, bought some cards and tried to resell them when in fact I'd made them all myself. Every person that bought something from my stall was incredibly nice and kind.

In all honestly I was glad after just selling one card but when I got home and counted the earnings I'd made I was so surprised. The next day I had a lady contact me that had bought one of my cards, she ended up buying an original painting and another couple of cards. So from the one fete I'd earned £35.50 which for a first time really isn't all that bad!

I've learned that I need to make a sign or banner that states I'm an artist and my crafts are handmade, I'd also like to get an extra table that allows me to paint at the same time so that people can see I do create my art work. A good first experience and look forward to the next!

Birthday Cards

I just received my order of birthday cards that I designed, I created five different watercolour designs and sent them off to be made into greeting cards. They feature different designs, including flowers, cakes and a fairy.

They are now up on my Etsy shop for sale! Please feel free to have a look at

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SophiekIllustrations

 

Artists I like #11

Upon not having written a blog post in quite sometime, I'm now aiming to do one blog post a week. I most more often on my Instagram because of the ease and instant access.

Anyway, I've been meaning to do this artist for a while after seeing the adverts on television for a couple of years now. They're the adverts for TSB bank. 

I absolutely adore the illustrations in this advert, they're so bright and friendly. From just looking at the videos they seem to be watercolour painted stop frame animation. On the studios website, Studio AKA, it just states that they are hand crafted 2D animations. Doesn't let on too much how they were made but you can see within the clips the change in colours suggesting they were recreated frame by frame. They could also be just computer animated with the affect of watercolour but it's difficult to tell. 

Either way I think the illustrations are lovely but perhaps belong in a children's book rather than a bank advert!

Inktober

I started Inktober this month, the challenge is to draw every day during the month of October. It seems really fitting seeing as I just started my Illustrative Instagram account and need to put work out there! I've added my Instagram to both my website and blog which can be found along the menu; otherwise my account is @sophiekingillustrations. Feel free to give me a follow if you'd like, I'll be posting daily during October! 

 My drawings with range from style and time taken, some will be quick doodles while others will be longer projects. I hope I can do them daily, I don't see why not..

Here's a couple I've done so far.
 

Once Upon A Time In Lari

Upon my recent travels to Tuscany, Italy, I visited a small town called Lari. Lari is known for its circle center that circles round a medieval castle. You can make your way to the top and venture inside to look around. It's in quite impressive condition and being a fan of the medieval period I enjoyed the visit. Inside the tourist shop were these two books that I straight away wanted to buy because of the colours and illustrations. The artist is Tommaso Levente Tani.

 They are fun interactive picture books that appeal to multiple ages. The reason I wanted these so much is because it's an aim of mine to produce a picture book similar to these that have historical information. The set of two consists of one history book explaining the history of Lari and how the castle and town grew over the years. The other book is a fold out activity booklet which has small puzzles and games to do.

 I also got drawn to these books because of the focus on Heraldry they both have, even down to designing and meanings. I previously did a project on Heraldry and find the topic extremely interesting.

 The pages are beautiful and colourful, the translation from Italy is a little bit poor and some of the sentences don't quite make sense but it's still a lovely book to add to my collection. The illustrations are vector based with quite a simplistic style, the characters have a "copy and paste" feel but it works really well. I think these are lovely little books with lots of information displayed in a very attractive way!

Summer Card Project

I got notified of this event on DeviantArt called the Summer Card Project. It involves creating a card or two with the theme of summer but also a get well/ thinking of you card. The purpose of the cards are to be sent off to hospitals and given to those who are ill or injured from young to old. Summer is my favourite season and I enjoy creating cards so I thought it would be a nice idea to join in.

I wanted to create a card that wasn't purely summer themed (i.e not a bucket or beach) so I decided to pick a sunflower for the element of one card and a bumble bee for the other.

The Bee card is just coloured card stacked up with a hole through two players to reveal the white. I did this with a circle cutter. I then hand drew the bee and coloured with Pro Markers. I used foam stickers to make the bee "float" and did a speech bubble pun related to the bee. The idea is not to say "Get Well Soon" but provide a message that's uplifting. I drew the dotted line and the final card I was pretty pleased with!

The next card I designed involved using watercolours and just doing blog shapes which would then be drawn over with a black fine liner. The "blobs" of paint just suggest the shape of the object with the fine liner defining the shape. The idea isn't supposed to be perfect in-the-line picture but more childish and still looks good. I also have plans to reproduce this card theme and sell them on my Etsy shop!

I'm very happy with both cards and I included my website for whomever receives my card, hopefully they let me know as I'd be excited to find out who receives it! If you want to find out more about the SCP the link is below. It closes on the 31st July so it may be too late for countries outside the US but it happens at Christmas time too so you could participate then as well!

http://madizzlee.deviantart.com/journal/Summer-Card-Project-617277123

Final Year Show

The final year show has come and gone! I submitted 3 A2 screen prints along with a landscape book of Renaissance Architecture. After a year of trial and error I finally nailed the technique for large screen prints and I'm really happy with how the finals came out. 

For the show I also created some free to take zine books with a little bit of information about the buildings themselves. I had work on sale in the shop including one of the buildings as well as some prints of the HMS Victory I did previously.

The landscape concertina book, made up of the same prints as the larger scale versions. Handmade the covers and bound myself. I learned so much about Renaissance architecture over the year and it really inspired me. I enjoy historical subjects so much and probably enjoying researching more than producing actual artwork! 

I presented my prints as a sort of "planning wall", perhaps how an architectures study may look. Pinned up prints and plans to build a bigger picture. Although I didn't manage to sell any prints at the show I shall be selling them on my Etsy page. I also have been contacted since with an offer to sell my work on a website but I'm not particularly interested as they were only willing to offer me 20% of the selling price. Now I just have to produce more personal work and get out into the world with my 2:1 degree!