“Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival features top emerging illustrators and designers as well as more established names in graphic arts. This year Pick Me Up is part of UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility, and focuses on the themes of community within the graphic arts.” Selected works by up and coming illustrators and graphic artists featured including typography, 3D installations and animations.     My favourite selected work were these self-playing instruments which produced unique unusual sounds. Crafted by Set Designers Isabel + Helen:    

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I’m excited that the 2016 Pick Me Up Design festival starts next week, between 21st April – 2nd May. I attended last year and was amazed by the quality of work being produced by designers, illustrators and artists. There were live demos taking place, screen printing workshops and much more. I particularly enjoyed the section where you could sit among others and do some colouring-in! It’s definitely worth a look around for budding designers or those who take joy in visual delights. A few photos from the 2015 exhibition:

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It has been one year since I finished my Graphic Design course at Shillington College. I went to an exhibition of the more recent graduates to gain some inspiration and see the new work being produced. It’s always fun to meet new designers and talk about the process through their work. A few photos from Shillington College graduation show (April 8th 2016):

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I have just finished reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. It shares insights on the subject of creativity, covering general thoughts and personal stories from her life and others. What I liked about it was that it drew from her own individual experience as an aspiring writer. The book feels like she is talking to other aspiring writers or artists. I enjoyed her narrative which was both informal and direct. Completing it felt like reading 10 pages rather than its 200 or so pages- I simply could not put it down! Here are a few lessons I learnt from reading…

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The Saatchi Gallery held Jamie Hewlett‘s first fine art exhibition in Nov 2015. I was excited to hear about this event as he is one of my favourite graphic artists, most well known for his artwork on the band Gorillaz and the Tank Girl graphic novel. Three bodies of work were on display: his interpretations of tarot cards; etchings of the Pinus Pinaster tree in different orientations and unexpectedly (or not unexpectedly!); soft-core porn movie posters were presented in a side room. In the Tarot series, I enjoyed the symbolism of the artworks, how each representation, marking or character had…

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I made this website and blog using a self-hosted WordPress site on wordpress.org. I had been wanting to learn how to make WordPress websites for some time as a lot of professional websites are built using the WordPress platform and it has a lot of options for flexibility with responsive layout customisation. It also saves money to learn how to code websites yourself; instead of buying a fancy template with limited drag-drop functions. Potentially with coding, any free template could be changed to look however you want it to be. This then took me on a long winding journey, as…

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Hi, I’m Sam. I recently graduated from studying Graphic Design at Shillington College in July. This is my design blog, which will include articles about inspiring art exhibitions/events I attend, hilights of my favourite artists and designers, sharings of my creative process or any other good quality content I think my readers would find of value or general interest. Follow me at: Twitter Pinterest

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