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.

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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!

Welcome and Hello!

This morning we installed the latest enhancements at the Children's Emergency department at the Royal Derby. They consisted of a Welcome wall made from various sea themed letters printed in vinyl (my favourite's the jellyfish!), a large hand painted wall divider (see below!), some wayfinding enhancements and a 3D ceiling hanging made up of wooden fish, spades, ice creams and starfish. Once again a lovely project to work on with all the calming sea colours. Great fun to create something 3D too!

Make and Mend out today!

Hurrah! Our book is out today! Packed full of techniques, patterns and projects to help you turn your old clothes and fabrics in to beautiful gifts and items! You can buy your copy here and visit the Make and Mend blog here!