Merry Christmas from Firecatcher!

This years Christmas card took inspiration from the 12 days of Christmas poem. We decided to imagine the chaos that would ensue if the poem was interpreted as a school play. The main card has all 12 days represented within one illustration, with 12 separate 'days' as additional illustrations.

Woodland Wonders at Good Hope Hospital

We recently created a lovely scheme of enhancements for a Special Care Baby Unit in Birmingham. The brief was to create an environment that was warm, welcoming and felt like a home from home for new parents and their babies. The chosen scheme used a pastel palette in combination with delicate illustrations and pretty patterns to create a contemporary nursery look.

- Moodboard with proposed colour schemes and initial ideas -

Taking inspiration from questionnaire feedback, we used ‘Nature’ as a theme, creating ‘woodland walks’ and bringing an element of the outside inside through floor to ceiling 'hand drawn trees'. We split four main corridors into seasons, creating foliage and wildlife for each one; Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.

 - Woodland Walk -

- Concept drawing -

Flying down the main corridor, the Good News birds carry tidings of joy!

Throughout the ward we created a series of frame walls. We told stories through these clusters of frames; including the tale of the birth of three fox cubs and the woodland celebrations that followed! 

 - They arrived in the middle of the night under the light of the full moon -

- The two sleepy but exultant foxes smiled at their new arrivals -

- The Woodland Orchestra play in celebration! -

A frame wall created for nurses to stick thank you letters from parents and photographs of new babies. 

The Woodland theme was continued into the cot ward, creating a peaceful sleeping environment.

Bletchley Park

A couple of weeks ago we were invited to the re-opening of the Post Office at Bletchley Park. We've designed a few of the first day covers sold in the Post Office, all Bletchley themed. We were delighted to attend, the weather was glorious and the Post Office looked great! Lovely to see our covers in situ too!

The Royal Philatelist cutting the ribbon!

Beautiful lake complete with swan!

 First day covers for sale in the Post Office.

The Great British Fashion covers as designed by us! Read more about these here.

Everyday Thai Cooking

Our latest project for How To Books involved creating a sketchbook style series of illustrations for Everyday Thai Cooking, a book with lots of easy, delicious recipes.  It was lovely to look longingly at the lovely places of Thailand, whilst the bowls of noodles made us very hungry indeed!

ID Fest

ID Fest is a film festival organised by QUAD, taking place over four days in May. The festival includes screenings,  live appearances from key industry figures, professional practice events and premieres of new films. This year we created the overall look for the festival by combining characters from films old and new and sought to emulate the festival programme itself and the way classic films are juxtaposed with contemporary and emerging films and talent by combining more graphic shapes with film textures and hand drawn elements. Visit the ID Fest website for more information or to buy tickets here.

(Brochure cover back) You can view the brochure in it's entirety here.

 Website design - Home page

 Website design - Photos page

 Website design - About page

Great British Fashion Stamp Covers

We were recently asked by Bletchley Park to design a first day cover for a new set of stamps designed around Great British Fashion. The design was to have a 1940's theme related to fashion and to Bletchey Park itself. We took inspiration from the work of iconic fashion illustrator René Gruau also working around this time, and created a glamourous wartime code breaker against a very British backdrop.

As well as creating the covers, we designed a stamp cancel (below).

  

The beautiful stamps shown here were designed by Johnson Banks.

Summer Nights

We recently created a hand drawn logo for QUAD's Summer Nights Film Festival, which shows classic and contemporary films at fabulous locations throughout Derbyshire on a giant screen. The poster and brochure we created used a beautiful photograph of Calke Abbey by Graham Lucas Commons combined with a long landscape illustration detailing the venues through simple graphics inside the brochure. The brochure rolled out to create a panoramic view and uses warm colours to create the feeling of a balmy summer evening. Tickets for the films are available here, now which film to see...!

Mr Digwell's Gardening Year

We have just received the advance copies of a book we recently provided additional illustrations for. Mr. Digwell was a cartoon featured in the Daily Mirror, offering gardening advice. This book is a mix of the old cartoons (all copyright the Daily Mirror) and our new ones. It was fun to work in a retro cartoon style and the brush pens are all a bit worn out now!