UPside - reasons to be cheerful

I'm taking part in a group exhibition, to be held next month, alongside 13 other artists as part of our ongoing Playroom collective.

The exhibition is entitled UPside and aims to present a varied collection of private fascinations, small joys, curiosities and indulgences. In short, our reasons to be cheerful!

I've been doing some initial thinking about the project and decided that my own personal reason to be cheerful was my friends. Good friends are always there when you need them, and even when you don’t. They are there to share the good times and can help make a bad situation seem less so.

Or to put it another way...



Anyway, inspired by my recent illustration for Amelia's Magazine which involved a series of portraits, I decided to produce a number of portraits of my friends. My idea was for the final piece to be large in size (around A1) but the individual images to be relatively small, so that the work will reward closer viewing, while also providing a pleasing overall aesthetic.

I mocked-up a version of how I envisage the final piece to look, using a series of faces from recent birthday cards I've produced for friends...


I'm going to be working on this project over the next few weeks, and will post some more updates in the meantime.

The exhibition will be held at the Medcalf Gallery in Exmouth Market in September, and I will post the details of the dates and times of the exhibition as soon as we've finalised everything.