Illustration Shop in Eldon Foyer IPP

We were able to get the opportunity to run an illustration shop in the Eldon Building Foyer. After the success of the last grad show shop the lecturers thought it'd be a good idea to run a shop at another point in the year and they ask me and Helena if we would want to have half of the table be for the Illustration Society as we had made so many zines and products (badges, stickers and bookmarks). And of course we said yes, so we spent a lot of our time preparing the stock for the shop. Deciding prices (getting a lot of help from tutors), making more things and counting everything up, as well as preparing our own individual stock for the other part of the shop. Which, would be for all of the students on the Illustration course. Adam and Phoebe were enlisted to help run the shop with us as they were equally as enthusiastic about it. And when it came to the day we seemed to be the dream team! 

It was an amazing experience to basically run this shop all by ourselves. We had to set up and manage purchases and attract people to the stall (which Adam was AMAZING at btw). We were able to talk with all sorts of people coming in and out of the Eldon Building and altogether it was a great experience. 

At the end we made £1000! Which is a new record for an Illustration shop ran in the Uni and absolutely SHOCKED everyone (but mostly Helena). 

Collaboration With Helena

 Me and Helena only met at the beginning of third year and we became quick friends because of our passion for our work, and also because of how often we are in the studio.

We had a long talk about motivation to do work and got around to talking about doing drawing outside of our illustration projects, and how important that is for an artist in general. We had the idea to do some collaborative artwork for fun and in all honesty I thought it would be one of those things you suggest to someone and then it never happens. But, we somehow pushed though and came up with a solid idea that was doable for both of us, and put no pressure on our projects. 

We started with the idea of combining our themes of our work, mine being horror and Helena's being nature. So we physically cut out words related to our projects and put them in a cups, then I picked one of Helena's and she picked one of mine and we'd each have to make an illustration responding to those words. We made sure to make two layers to the drawings because we wanted to use risograph, which was because we both wanted to experiment with it for our own projects (why not do it together then!).

Our first illustrations were with the words 'Zombie' and 'Shrike'. And we use the colours mint and black because the mint was a new colour we wanted to try, and I guess I couldn't give up black (which in hindsight is silly and we moved on to crazy colours very quickly, and they looked much better).

Helena's on the left. Mine on the right.

The first list of words!!!! It only grew...