The amazingly talented Illustration student, Rachel Hyde captured our hearts with her stitched material zine six months ago, so much so - we invited her to decorate our Sydney Street shop windows. With the Brighton and fireworks scene beautifully hand illustrated over the course of a day, we pin her down for a quick chat before she returns to her studies...
People and buildings often feature in your work “ what is it about these subjects that inspire you? I'm particularly inspired by buildings, I don't know what it is about them, I just find myself obsessed! They're all around us, yet a lot of people miss the architectural detail of buildings that they walk past every day. When you do draw a building, you look a lot closer and realise how much you miss just looking as you walk past. It's quite fascinating how buildings vary as well, there is an illustration project by James Gulliver Hancock in which he set himself the challenge of drawing all the buildings in New York. Each illustration you look at in this project is so different because all the buildings themselves are so different. I also love the fact that you never know what happens inside each building, or who lives there. Each one probably holds so many stories and it's fun to guess. I find myself drawing people for a similar reason, each person is different with a different story and it's fun to play around with these. Quite often I end up not giving people faces or much detail (mainly because I'm not very good at drawing faces!) but also because this lets you imagine a face and story for the person yourself. Both these subjects also work really well when drawn in a simple line of work, something which I find myself doing a lot.
Which course are you studying? I'm currently studying illustration at The Arts University in Bournemouth and am in my second year. I'm really enjoying myself on the course and am finding myself trying out so many new ways of working. The uni is such an inspiring place to study and helped share one of my projects that resulted in this collaboration!
Where can we see your work? My work can be found in several places at the moment! The main place I showcase my work is at www.rachelhydeportfolio.tumblr.com. I also have a lot of social media where I share my work and uni projects including a Facebook page an Twitter page. As I'm still at uni, I'm still developing my visual language and illustration style so any feedback when looking at my work would be hugely appreciated.
What processes did you take with our shop windows? The shop window idea originally stemmed from a university project called ˜Independent Brighton' in which I studied Independent shops in Brighton's North Laines, including Posh Totty Designs! Within this project, I made a material zine that was completely stitched! I'd never done anything like this before and taught myself a freehand machine embroidery technique from scratch. The final zine can be seen here (on my Vimeo) and on my tumblr portfolio. After sharing the zine on social media I became in touch with the lovely team at Posh Totty Designs and we came up with a design. Since I moved to Brighton last year and have found the city so inspiring and accepting, I wanted to celebrate this on the window and also put my obsession with buildings to good use. As a result, my design includes a Brighton skyline and also some fireworks over the top, just in time for fireworks night next month! I've never done a window display before, so this whole concept has been so exciting for me. I decided to draw up the window on paper first to make things a little easier and have found myself covering my whole floor with massive bits of paper as a result. I've also never done anything on such a large scale before so have found it really interesting and challenging to enlarge and develop my usual way of working. After this step, it was just a case of drawing straight onto the window and bringing the design to life! I'm super excited about the whole concept.
Don't miss seeing Rachel's window display in person at our Brighton store for a limited time! You can also see a timelapse of the making of the window display on our facebook page.
