On Sunday 15th April I took part in the first Illustration & Design Forum run by Shipshape Studios; presenting a talk with advice for aspiring illustrators and designers! As you can imagine, I was absolutely petrified, but once I got going I really enjoyed it and realised public speaking isn’t as scary as you’d think… mostly! My fellow panelists Emma Block & Alice Potter were great, and it was really interesting because we were all coming from different angles – Alice studied textiles but has now moved into illustration, Emma has been lucky enough to be freelance right out of Uni, and then there’s me of course!
I gave a little slideshow of my work (here I am looking all profesh) from University until now – talking about how I got to where I am, my advice on what to do (and not to do) and my personal path from illustration student to in-house graphic designer.
A few of my slides showed my notable commissions to date, and I talked about how they came about (the power of twitter, essentially!). I then moved on to recent work, how I got my first job at Yumi, and some recent work from our Office SS12 in-store scheme.
All three of us had work & prints available to buy (some of mine are above) which was great – and has inspired me to sell my prints on etsy. Watch this space!
I was also given this beautiful handmade card from Astrid of Schwarzie Designs – with a lovely little note on the back!
How pretty?
It was a really fun day and hopefully everyon who attended enjoyed it and got what they wanted from it – I know just how hard and daunting it is straight after Uni, events like this were always really helpful to me in working out what I wanted to do!
