My Collection of Sewn Hearts (who want to love you)

A few months ago, I made a set of gross little Vomiting Hearts - for those of you who want to express your love to someone but maybe don't want to be too soppy about it. Well, I enjoyed making these so much (and also owning an abundance of red felt & stuffing) I decided to add to my heart family! So the past few weeks I have been stitching together a few more squishy heart friends to hopefully sell in my Etsy shop.

My work station

Geeky Heart

Glitter Star

Smiley Heart

Suave Heart

They've been a lot of fun to make, I want to get me a few tutorial books on stitching felt toys as I'd love to be able to do more complicated shapes and stitches. I've still got a lot of red felt left so you can expect a few more hearts coming from me in the future!

I decided to make some packaging for these guys as well so they looked a bit more professional; and this is what I came up with...

Doodles & notes & drafts

Printed tags

All put together

It was interesting to put the 'nafftastic' brand on packaging, seeing it all made up together makes me really enthusiastic to make more products and packaging - but first I need to see if there are enough people who like them! I've got my fingers and toes and ears crossed that I will be able to get a stall at the annual Winter Arts Market in Liverpool's St Georges Hall this year, and then I'll be able to see first hand how general shoppers like my stuff! The thought of it is exciting, if a little bit scary!

Traffic Poster Concepts

Just a couple of concepts I did for a campaign, which unfortunately didn't get the go ahead, but thought I would post them up here.

Southport & Formby Brand Guidelines

Last year I was given the chance to create a set of family-orientated characters for the brand guidelines of Southport & Formby's Clinical Commissioning Group. The SFCCG favoured a hand-drawn approach, which was right up my street so I just set to it and churned out a whole bunch of people! At first I had a bit of trouble creating a bold, thick outline for the characters - until I discovered the glory of a charcoal pencil! I didn't realise these types of pencil existed until I stumbled across them in my local art shop. They are very useful for creating a stark sort of line that makes your illustrations much bolder.

My working process was to sketch my characters out, trace them on a lightbox using the charcoal pencil, scan them into the computer, and then clean them up and apply some nice homely textures onto them to promote that nice home-made feel.

I also created a long monochrome background, the monochrome-ness was to help the hand drawn characters stand out on the page.

Here are a couple of pages from the brand guidelines were you can see a couple of the illustrations being used in example company documents and the like. (The guidelines were designed and put together by the magical graphic design talents of SplinterSkip!

Little People Characters

Some little characters I made to be added to an already existing set for a company's brand guidelines. Just a quick job, but fun to experiment with the style.