A sparkly seahorse for Bloom and Wild

This year Bloom and Wild ran a design competition, to give different artists a chance to design their summer packaging.

They did not ask for fully completed entries, just sketches and moodboards to indicate what kind of design you would look to produce. The winner would then get the chance to produce their design for Bloom and Wild and choose all the trimmings such as the ribbon around the box and the card inside.

From my initial brain storm I knew I wanted to use the Pantone colour of the year, living coral as the inspiration for the piece because I was very interested in the environmental message of this years colour choice. However, rather than using the colour coral, I chose to use the visual of coral and underwater plants since to me that represents the summer season. Some of the plants selected for the summer bouquets also looked like they would sit well in a magical underwater garden.

Japanese fashion inspires me a lot, and since I was already thinking about magic and joy and sparkles - I turned the queens of kawaii frippery, Angelic Pretty. I looked at a lot of their prints in a very in depth manner and assessed how they used colour and achieved their unique visual style.

I created the initial sketch using pencil and paper, and then created the seahorse using Adobe Photoshop. Rather than blending the colours, I used a cell-shading like process to imitate the Angelic Pretty look, while still adding lots of textures to give the seahorse depth and personality. If you look close up, you can see how I’ve used lines and dots to create depth of shading while keeping a small palette.

Lately I’ve been very interested in different techniques that make printing more eco-friendly and sustainable - and I considered this as part of the environmental message of the overall piece. The flower boxes would almost definitely get thrown away, so I wanted to use printing techniques on recyclable, uncoated card and eco-glitter.