Curious Clare’s Studio

I have decided to write a post on my studio today as it has been featured by the lovely Katy Cowan on Creative Boom this week. If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts you will know that my studio can be found at Local Creation in Altrincham.

I fit in studio visits around being an Art teacher and Community Co-ordinator (and writing this blog!). The studio has to given me space to focus upon my own work. I have spent time decorating it as I wanted to create a haven that I would want to take myself off to.





Alice Melvin's Cut Out and Make Menagerie can be found here
 

 

I aim to use the studio two days a week. One evening a week, I meet up with friends for an informal art club where we chat and ‘art’ (although this involves much more chatting & chocolate eating than doing!).

 

As was mentioned on Creative Boom my own art work is quite varied as I love trying out new things and like to use materials to suit my ideas. I work with Ceramics, Textiles and digital media such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

Since acquiring the studio I’ve designed flyer a for Vintage Afternoon Teas , designed a postcard for French Knots Craft Studio and I am about to create their new logo.  I am currently making laser cut Perspex trophies for The Joshua Tree’s Fun Run and I have been approached by a magazine to produce some illustrations for them (fingers crossed).

My Upcycled Jam Jar Tutorial can be found here

I am also working on a new personal project called ‘Paper Conversations’ that is a mix of illustrations and three-dimensional objects. Last but not least, I’m playing around with a series of quirky badges that I hope to start selling soon.

 

Flyer design - Vintage Afternoon Teas

Earlier this year, I was delighted to be contacted by Gwyneth Brock, founder and owner of Vintage Afternoon Teas to discuss designing a new flyer to promote her business. The design brief specified the inclusion of homemade cakes, oozing with delicious fillings and the importance of using vintage china (as the hire of china is one of the services that the business offers).

My design work for the flyer started off with a series of photographs. I am fortunate to own several items of vintage china that belonged to my great grandparents and was lent various cake stands by teaching colleagues. I played around with different ways of arranging and stacking the china before settling on the two images that you can see below.

As Gwyneth wanted a ‘clean’ design style, I decided to create crisp line drawings in Adobe Illustrator. I could then experiment with applying pattern and colour in Adobe Photoshop. The patterns that you can see in the designs started off as scans of various papers and fabrics that I have collected over the years. Colours were changed and areas cropped out to make them more unique to the flyer design.

Surprisingly, the cake proved to be the most problematic area of the design. It was vital to convey the scrumptious nature of the cakes that Gwyneth makes. Although the initial designs complete with ‘button’ fruit look delicious I felt that they were lacking the ‘wow’ factor. Gwyneth specified that the cake should look homemade and have fillings oozing out of it. After several re-workings of the cake illustration (including scanning a car sponge for the cake texture!), I decided upon a two tier cake with fat fresh strawberries on the top instead of buttons.

 The final image went through several layout experiments in Adobe Illustrator in order to accommodate Gwyneth’s colour preferences and font choices. I initially used Giddyup Standard, Segoe Script and Poor Richard fonts until I discovered Gwyneth’s love of typewriter text. The final design uses Cooper Black and Courier New which has been ‘aged’ in Adobe Photoshop (good tutorial here). The font colour is teal (or more specifically Focoltone 2258). The final design (see top of page) looks effective on different sizes and will hopefully attract lots of new custom for Gwyneth!