Art Journal Page: Beer Festival

Peterborough Beer FestivalMy annual pilgrimage to Peterborough Beer Festival this year was on 23rd August. Of course I went to meet up with friends… it’s purely coincidence we had 400 real ales to choose from at the time. While supping such delights, I’ve recorded my tasting notes in my art journal. It looks worse than it is – I was only sampling thirds of a pint of most. It’s also brilliant that the organisers ensure bottles of water are easily available at just 50p per 500ml.

The page uses all the bits and bobs in my journal travel kit. It was a challenge doing the background and lettering on the train from Leicester, particularly over the points when the train rocked a fair amount!

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Bespoke Wedding Invitations (Part 1)

The hardest thing about keeping my blog up to date with my crafty exploits is that some of my work has to be kept under wraps until the special reveal. So there may be times when I seem to be quiet – but in fact working frantically to meet deadlines!

Today’s post is one of those. A good friend asked me to make her wedding invitations – and now they’ve been sent and received, I won’t be spoiling any surprises 🙂

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Both Jess and Stuart are real ale aficionados, and we’ve spent hours together working our way through the bar at the Peterborough Beer Festival. What more fitting then than a personal hand pull badge? I drew the hand pull from reference photographs, and then scanned it and coloured it in Illustrator. The badge was designed in a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. After creating print proofs, cut lines were created in Illustrator and sent to Silhouette Cameo using their Connect plug-in. It was then a matter of assembling the parts using 1mm deep foam pads to add some dimension (and allow avoidance of large letter postage).

By my reckoning, one can measure how successful a job has gone by whether more work is commissioned as a result. Happily, the couple are so delighted, I’ve been asked to adapt the design for the reception table labels.

Congratulations to the happy couple, all the best for the day, and here’s to another reunion at Peterborough in August 🙂

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