Wise Words: Handmade

With both me and Jamie being big fans of Ed Sheeran, it was inevitable that I would illustrate a quote from one of his new songs! In fact, this is the second one I have done, you can see the other one over on the Bea & Bloom Instagram account. This lyric stood out to me the first time I heard 'Castle on the Hill' and its definitely one of my favourite parts of the song.

No doubt I'll be doing more illustrations like this once the full album is released!

(The illustration is in the style of the Botanica range from Bea & Bloom)

Wise Words: True Friends

I've been working on lots of lovely illustrated romantic quotes over at Bea & Bloom, but its been a while since I worked on one with a different theme. So the first Wise Words illustration of 2017 is all about friendship, and is inspired by the wonderful support I've received from my lovely friends in the last few weeks. Most of my friends live quite a distance from me (including one, my Maid of Honour, in Florida!) so the sentiment of this lovely quote felt very special to me.

Do you have a favourite quote, saying or lyric that you'd like to see me illustrate?

Over & Over: The Moon and the Stars

I'm hoping to get back to more regular posting in 2017, and creating lots of lovely new illustrations to share with you. I thought I'd kick things off with one of my favourite things to create, a new pattern.

This is inspired by the backdrop of the Stargazer illustration I created last year, which turned out to be one of my favourite pieces of work from the 12 months.

Hopefully this will be the first of many new pieces of work I'll be sharing this year!

As always I'm open to some suggestions for some lovely themes and quotes to illustrate.

Hello 2017

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone had a wonderful festive season.

2017 is a particularly exciting year for me, as it just so happens to be the year I get married! The countdown now really is on to the 23rd September!

Before I get started on all o my plans and goals for the year ahead, I just wanted to take a quick look over some of the highlights of 2016....

- An exciting, inspiring trip around the Baltics with Mum, Dad and Jamie.

- Working with some lovely new clients on some exciting projects.

- The launch of my new venture, Bea & Bloom.

- Wedding panning with my amazing, friends, family and of course my lovely fiancé, Jamie. Highlights include finding my dress, and an evening with my wonderful bridesmaids (one of which came all the way from Florida, so its now often we're all together!)

- Meeting some lovely new people and making some great new friends.

And here's a few of my goals and plans for 2017:

- Continue to find time to work on my own ideas and illustrations.

- Rebrand my little business and design some new business cards and promo materials.

- Work with more lovely clients.

- Design and launch a range of new products.

- Continue to promote Bea & Bloom and gain some lovely new clients there too.

- Enjoy every moment of the wedding planning process and what I'm sure will be the best day of my life with all the people I love.

Wising you all a wonderful 2017!

Snap Snap: 18/11/16

A long overdue update on what's been happening in the last few months....

- I chose my wedding dress! Read more about our wedding plans here.

- On the hottest day of the year (in September) we were at Thorpe Park! It was mid-week so very quiet and we had a great time with minimal queuing (and made good use of water rides to cool off!) 

-Could she be any cuter?

- We celebrated 5 years together and exactly one year until the wedding!

- As part of our anniversary celebration we met Catherine & Andy from White Stag Weddings in Greenwich Park for a special engagement photo shoot. See the full set here.

-We've visited a few wedding fairs and had lots of fun trying out photo booths!

-My 'Yesterday' notebook was featured in Natural Health Magazine this month.

- I also visited Chosen wedding fair with two of my lovely bridesmaids, and had a Facebook video call with the Maid of Honour (she lives in Florida!)

- We had a day of baking for a family get together. I made bake-wells for the first time and I must say they were pretty good! I'll be making them again very soon.

- She decided cuddles were much more important than my work :)

- We went on a lovely 3 day cruise to Bruges to celebrate Jamie's Grandparent's 50th Wedding Anniversary.

- 3 days of photoshoots getting ready for the launch of Bea & Bloom

- Bea & Bloom officially went live on Monday morning!

- It was birthday on Wednesday, so I of course had cake for breakfast.

- We spent the day in London and wandered round Borough Market, Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Camden Market, Leicester Square AND Covent Garden! You can probably guess form the number of food markets we visited that we ate A LOT that day!

I'll be back soon with some new illustrations to share!

Bea & Bloom is open for business!

Until logging in to write this post, I hadn't realised how long it's been since I last blogged here! Sorry for being so quiet lately, hopefully things will be getting back to normal from now on!

As you may know, for the last couple of months I have been working on my new venture, a wedding stationery business! After lots of longs days and late nights, Bea & Bloom officially launched yesterday morning and is now open for business!

I've shared a little introduction to the site over on the Bea & Bloom blog: beaandbloom.com/blog
If you have any questions or would like to discuss your wedding stationery ideas with me then please get in touch!

Caboodle's Diner

Earlier this year I created some fun illustrations for the AW16 issue of Caboodle Magazine, and this week I finally got to see it in the flesh as my copy landed on the doorstep!

The theme for the DIY/craft section of the issue was all things 'Fave food' and the brief mentioned burgers, milkshakes, fries, fizzy pop (along with lots of other yummy foods!) So I came up with an illustration of the Caboodle Diner, which Amy & Kayti used as the title page! I also created a few spot illustrations which have been used within the tutorials. The project was so fun to work on, despite making me hungry when I was looking at all the reference images for donuts, cakes & ice cream sundaes! I had a slight disaster after getting most of the diner drawing done I noticed I'd spelt Caboodle wrong, oops! But I managed to fix it without too much stress, I love how its turned out! And of course its great to get to see my work in a magazine for the first time!

I haven't had a chance to properly read the whole issue yet, but after a quick flick through it certainly looks amazing and I can't wait to delve into it fully!

You can order your copy here.

Custom House Portraits

I've added another new custom listing to the shop: House Portraits!

House portraits are perfect if you're looking for a lovely illustration of your home. Or I can illustrate your wedding venue, favourite hotel, or anything else you can think of!

Special details such as pets, flowers etc. can be included within the image to make it even more personal, and you'll always receive a sketch of your illustration before I work on the final image, so you can make sure you're completely happy with it!

Find out more in my Etsy shop.

Custom maps and portraits are also available.

Jelly Button Jewellery

I've been wanting to share these for a while now as I designed the first one earlier on this year, but I thought I'd wait until the whole selection was ready (although more are on their way now too!)

I designed these enamel pins for the lovely Michelle of Jelly Button Jewellery.

I had so much fun working on these, Michelle's ideas are always so fun to create!

They're all available to buy on her website for £6.50 each (plus P&P), and she has lots of other lovely things available too!

(The little gnome is also available as a pair of earrings for £4.50 here)

Look out for new milkshake and Mr Frosty designs coming soon!

Tallinn Walls

Today I'm sharing an illustration of one of my favourite places from our holiday to the Baltics: Tallinn, Estonia. The whole place felt like we were in the middle of a medieval fairytale, so I of course absolutely loved the entire day!

As you can probably imagine I took hundreds of pictures of these while we were there and they've given me lots of inspiration for new illustration! Starting with these old walls with fairytale turrets that surrounded the old town. 

I'll be working on some more illustrations inspire by Tallinn in the next few weeks :)

Custom Travel Maps

A new product has landed in my Etsy shop:

Custom Travel / Adventure Maps

Pick a selection of your favourite places you've travelled to (or would like to visit in the future) and the landmarks/objects that you associate with them and I'll create you your very own custom travel map! Head to the shop listing for more information on pricing, lead times etc. and get in touch if you have any questions!

Snap snap: 11/08/16

Its been a while since I wrote a 'Snap snap" post, so I thought I'd stop in and share a few updates of what I've been up to lately...

Of course an update of life lately wouldn't be complete without a picture of Beabea. Lots of cuddles have been happening as always.

Picnics in Greenwich Park. We made the most of that really warm week and I met Jamie in the park after work for a picnic dinner.

A lovely, long overdue catch up with one of my wonderful bridesmaids.

My wedding scrapbook is filling up with lots of ideas, sketches and quotes!

We've made lots of progress on actually planning the wedding too, including picking our cars! There's much more about our wedding plans over on the Bea & Bloom blog too.

I've been working on some designs for  my upcoming wedding stationery business, Bea & Bloom.

Last weekend we took Beabea out for the day to Danson Park. She had lots of fun running around, making friends, chasing birds and sharing our lunch!

Hopefully I'll get back to sharing these more often! In the mean time you can follow me on Instagram and Snapchat (emillustration) for snippets of daily life.

Russian Dolls

In all the drawings I'd been doing of our trip around the Baltics, I realised last week that I hadn't yet illustrated one of my favourite things from the whole trip: Matryoshka Dolls (or Russian/nesting dolls)

Of course that had to change immediately, so I've designed a set of 5 dolls inspired by this pattern based on mosaics on the ceilings of the Church of the Savior on Blood.

Here they all are in more detail:

Introducing Bea & Bloom

You may have seen on my various social media profiles that I'm in the process of starting up a brand new business. Bea & Bloom will be launching soon selling a range of illustrated wedding stationery, all designed by me.

A temporary homepage is now set up at beaandbloom.com, and I've shared a few wedding related posts on the new blog (this is where I'll be sharing my own wedding planning updates from now on so if you're interested in reading about that head over there and give the new blog follow).

To be the first to know when the website launches fully, sign up to the mailing list here.

You can also follow along on Bea & Bloom's own social media pages:

Facebook   |   Twitter   |   Instagram

There I'll be sharing lots of updates on the site, designs in progress and details on our launch date.

Over & Over: From Russia part III

Today I've got the third and final instalment of patterns inspired by the Church of the Savior on Blood. These two are inspired by the impressive mosaics that cover the interior walls of the church.