We’ve just got home from another brilliant and exhausting PG Live in London! It was a particularly special one as two of my best friends in the industry, Louise Tiler and Pennie at Tache were sponsoring the famous lunch and it was completely beautiful! You can’t hope for a more social and happy show to be apart of. We caught up with lots of old and new customers and feel a little bit ready for the weekend.
AFRICA launch
Our AFRICA range launched at the show, and it’s been a passion project for me since returning from the most extraordinary trip to Tanzania at the end of last year. It’s a blanks range with a slightly different feel to our better known quirky animal illustrations. For a start, all the cards have backgrounds which I actually find really challenging when designing, as I normally rely a lot on negative space in my final compositions. The colour pallet for this range is earthy with lots of ochres, siennas and greens and the illustrations themselves are more fine arty than our Furry Friends designs, with less characterisation.
I built up each composition by painting all the elements separately and in some cases there were literally hundreds of photoshop layers per design. Some of my ideas didn’t really work, possibly because the animals were a bit niche as well as the form of the animal being really hard to capture, with the result being that the animals were completely unrecognisable… warthog I’m talking about you! And other designs I butchered just at the optimum moment when making the rash decision to paint the background directly around the animal. It was inevitable I’d mess it up of course! The elephants at sunset are an example of this flippancy haha!
I’ve loved painting in this way and have loads more ideas for new additions to the collection. I want to have a real variety of compositions, animal close ups contrasted with more landscapey designs. The zoomed out designs are definitely my biggest challenge because of the spacial awareness that’s a real weakness of mine at the moment.
New Furry Friends
We also launched a bunch of new Furry Friends birthday designs at the show. Our bestseller was this elderly lad below! If you’re a trade customer, you can view and purchase the entire range in our shop 🙂
