Hi-Fest

HIFEST

I recently went to Hastings Illustration festival to be inspired by other illustrators. There were a number of stalls selling prints, badges, cards and T-Shirts. Across the weekend there were different workshops, I attended one entitled Dear Diary where we were encouraged to illustrate our emotions from a bad day we had had. I had attended with my friend who is an engineer, he found the work shop quite stressful as he wasn’t confident at drawing, but I found his drawings the most interesting, when asked to draw our emotions, us illustrators went straight to drawing a face, where as he drew objects and diagrams that depicted how he felt, as shown above.

We also attended a panel talk on non-fiction illustration entitled “Learning through Illustration”. Illustrators Ben Newman, Owen Davey, Eleanor Taylor and Nicholas Stevenson gave their views on non-fiction illustration market. A theme which kept coming up was to MAKE THE WORK YOU WANT TO MAKE and bigger paid projects will come. Most of the books they had published had started from a personal interest or a personal project, someone had then seen it and proposed the idea of making it into something more. I left feeling inspired with a need to experiment with more non-fiction work and the aim to make more time to do personal projects I enjoy.