The Contemporary Craft Festival 2015

On Saturday I visited The Contemporary Craft Festival in Bovey Tracey, Devon. The weather was lovely and there were so many beautiful items by some talented designers and makers. Here is a rundown of some of my favourites:

Suzanne Breakwell

I loved Suzanne's adorable sculptures of birds and animals, you can tell that she really loves her subject, which is the natural world & all its glorious flora & fauna. Her pieces are constructed from wire, paper mache, pages from books and cotton rag papers.

Liz Willis Jewellery
Liz makes beautiful jewellery using tiny knots in silk thread, over gold and silver wire.

Emma Cocker
Emma creates fabric sculptures, characters & illustrations using knitting and stitching, combining antique, vintage and reclaimed textiles, and British wool. So cute!

 

Helen Round

Helen uses traditional hand screen printing techniques to create limited edition collections from her sketchbook drawings inspired by the Cornish landscape. She prints on to linen and hemp, and then carefully stitches to create beautiful pieces for you and your home. Also a very nice lady!

Benton's Menagerie

Tracey Benton sculpts these wonderful British birds and beasts by hand from 100% wool.

Emily Kidson

Emily uses old samples of colourful laminate (formica) to make this unique and imaginitive jewellery.

 

Vinegar and brown paper

Andy Poplar designs and etches onto all sorts of different glassware, including vintage items, apothecary bottles and laboratory glass.

Olive Rose

Emma of Olive Rose uses a Victorian lace craft called “Tatting” to manipulate a single line of thread into a complex structure, creating some unique jewellery.

Helaina Sharpley

Helaina creates 2d and 3d wirework pieces which feature all sorts of things from kitchenalia to iconic architecture, I was really impressed by her unique technique.

Miriam Jones

Miriam uses different types of wood which she sources and recycles and turns into beautiful bowls and other items, adding colourful cotton thread, which symbolises the concept of make do and mend.

Emily Notman

Emily creates a great range of fabric items, on her work: "I create bespoke textile installations and accessories mixing media and building up tactile delicate surfaces. I work and rework my pieces with paint, dyes, bleach and ink, burning and layering until finishing it with hand stitch."

The Store Hus

I was really impressed with this pair of printmakers, whose designs are simple yet bold and eye catching. They have produced range of hand printed practical and decorative items for the home.

Victorian Sewing and Gardening Screen prints

I've been busy creating some more screen prints using images from the Victorian picture book that I used for the Victorian Keys screen print and card I printed a few weeks ago.

As I have been watching the Chelsea Flower show whilst sewing this week, I thought about doing a gardening and a sewing print, so I collected lots of little images with these themes from the book, and arranged them, adding colour, to create these prints, I hope you like them! As always they're available from my Folksy and Etsy shops, whichever you prefer!

Victorian Sewing Screen Print

Victorian Gardening Screen Print

Ampersand and Victorian Keys Screen Prints

Last week I went to Marshfield Screen Print near Bath and used their lovely facilities to print my latest batch of prints. They're all available on both my Folksy and Etsy shops.

The Victorian keys were found in a whole book of Victorian images, I arranged them in a little collection.

Victorian Keys A3 Black Screen Print

Victorian Keys A3 Black Screen Print close up

Victorian Keys A3 Silver Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Black Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Black Screen Print close up

Victorian Keys A4 Silver Screen Print

Victorian Keys A4 Silver Screen Print close up

For this "Ampersand Collection" screen print I picked out ampersands from my favourite historical typefaces and arranged them for an A3 design.

Ampersands Collection A3 Screen Print

Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival 2015 part 2

Welcome to the second part of my favourite things from Pick Me Up festival 2015.

I watched a lecture by Robert Sollis, co- fonder of Europa on how they developed this year's identity for the festival. The studio developed several different variations of their typeface to create a dynamic visual identity which I think looks appropriate to the event, which is about innovation, the handmade and unique.

Examples of the typefaces

The promotional posters for the event were hand screen-printed in three colours, and those that were too big were painstakingly hand painted (such as the large sign right outside the venue). I love the overprinting on the spotty words.

 

Screen printed poster

The wall inside the Pick Me Up platform room was covered in these posters, with keywords about the event.

Screen-printed keywords (borrowed from PMU Facebook page)

One of the most interesting things to me about the identity was the way that they used the colour separations from the screen-printed posters to inspire some cut out large installations for inside of the festival. I always think it's really cool how you can sometimes still make sense of an image/ text even when not all of the colour separations are present (when screen-printing). You can see on the image below what I'm on about (sorry it is a bit dark!)

Installation with parts of the typeface visible

Back to some of my favourite works.
I had a go at using a printing machine with Sope Studio. They had prepared a series of background patterns, which you could choose from and then choose a second tile to be printed on the top, creating some really cool bits of art (they're all featured on a special Instagram page). Here's mine:

Sope Studio tiles

The guys also had some great work for sale, some was again based on geology and rocks (a bit of a theme going on!) such as this one by Lydia Shirreff, and some more of their lino printed tile designs.

 

Finally I bought a print by LaTigre, a graphic design studio based in Milan, directed by the designers Luisa Milani and Walter Molteni. I really liked the geometry and simplicity of this screen print, but it also has texture when you look closely.

There were lots of other amazing artists but I can't write about them all, so I advise that you visit immediately! The exhibition is on until 4th May at Somerset House. 

I realised that I had totally forgotten to mention the marvellous stand that was Ohh Deer! They were extremely nice and let me make a lovely Deer themed greetings card by sticking lots of stuff and scribbles together and then they had a postbox to post it to a friend.

I bought some coasters from them to brighten up my desk.

Glam rock coaster Gemma Correll

Elephant by Sophie Corrigan

Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival 2015 part 1

A couple of days ago I went to Somerset House in London to visit Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival 2015. I have been twice previously and always found it really inspiring!

Here are some of my favourite pieces/collectives/artists from the show.

One of the artists that really caught my eye even before I went was Hattie Newman. Her images are created by making actual 3D models out of paper/card, as part of the exhibition was an actual piece in a cabinet which showed her creative process, so fiddly but looks awesome!

Hattie's Earth Day piece for Kiehl's

Hattie is represented by Blink Art, who had a section exhibiting work from their other artists, as well as an activity creating scratch art! here is my lame attempt...

My scratch art

This is what the professional's looks like!

Another artist from Blink Art is Essy May, I don't think her work was displayed but I found it on their website, and I love it! Most of her work is both dark and colouful. Here is one of my favourite peices:

Save The Bees Bee Now Here by Essy May

The third artist from this group that caught my eye was Ryan Hopkinson, a photographer and director who creates amazing compositions for a variety of clients such as Adidas, Sony & Creative Review.

The Odyssey

Another collective who were offering a chance to take part in some creative stuff were Studio Fludd. They have a really interesting approach to ideas generation, and they really like Gelato. Their brief was to pick 2 adjectives (by choosing from a selection of cards, unfortunately not ones chosen yourself!) and them use them to create an ice cream (Gelato) image representing those words using loads of lovely materials. My words were Militant and Fusion, very random! This is my creation:

There's loads more info on their process and images of their work on the website. I especially like their science-based imagery on gemstones, risograph printed and made into a book.

Ephemera & Miscellanea book

There's lots more that I liked, coming soon in another post :)