Fleur De Lys - Rococo Inspired Design

I realised that although I’ve shared the visualisation boards I created for my last BA submission, I haven’t actually shared many of the designs here. This one was inspired by a popular highly ornamental trend of the 18th and 19th centuries; Rococo. I adore all those swirls and elaborate embellishments and I imagine I’ll be creating more inspired by the same theme. You can view this one in the ‘Pattern’ gallery on my homepage.

I experimented with this design using various processes in the textile print room at college. I’ll share more of those in a future post.

Fleur De Lys Handpainted Watercolour Rococo Baroque inspired Design by Susie Batsford

My Mats Prep for Bootcamp 2019

Hooray! It’s here again, the inevitable anticipation is over and our first ‘mini’ assignment has been released. Bootcamp with Lilla Rogers has to be one of the creative highlights of my year!

We get a week to work on a little warm up exercise before we’re given the main assignment. We then have 2 weeks until sharing our work in an online public gallery. Then a weeks rest before the cycle starts all over again and so it continues for four marvellous months of incredible inspiration with a group of kind, talented and wonderful artists, many of whom like me, come back year after year. There’s always a fabulous mixture of old and new faces alike and a buzz of excitement which is quite contagious.

Before the class begins, Lilla always posts a little preparation exercise or two. This time we had to collect a variety of objects from around our homes to create a colour palette from. That’s a photo of mine below. I’ll be sharing updates of my work from the assignments over the next few months so feel free to follow along.

My Mats Prep Bootcamp 2019 Colour Palette by Susie Batsford

MATS Children's Book Illustration - Ada Lovelace

Over the past few weeks, I've been completely absorbed in the latest https://makeartthatsells.com class: Illustrating Children's Books.

The course is utterly jam-packed with fantastic content to work through and each week there is a deadline for submitting your assignment.  It's taught by the magical Lilla Rogers and Children's Book Art Director, Zoe Tucker.  I must admit, I've found it very hard to keep up with the pace, partly due to my own time restrictions and the talent in the group is quite extraordinary.  It's wonderful having my news feed full of such utterly inspiring art everyday.

At the beginning, we had a choice of 3 texts and to start with, I have chosen Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and a most inspiration woman, attributed to developing the first ever computer in 1842.  I was excited to research Ada, partly because I simply love history and partly because I know I need to work on developing my people drawing skills.

The first few weeks have been all about character design and development, I have discovered a new-found respect for children's book illustrators, my goodness it's so hard!

Young Ada Lovelace