PROJECT: BESPOKE HAND LETTERING - ART PRINTS & CHRISTMAS CARD
CLIENT: MONKEY PUZZLE TRAINING & CONSULTANCY

Monkey Puzzle provide coaching and training for leaders and their teams. They help leaders find the time to lead and teams to align with purpose and direction. There is always a particular emphasis on mastering the most important leadership skill of all - good communication.

I had previously worked with Karen Meager & John McLachlan (the Founders of Monkey Puzzle) on some illustrations for their book about Time Mastery - which can be seen here

OBJECTIVE

To produce a set of custom, hand lettered art prints featuring quotes from Karen and John, who are both organisational psychologists. The prints were to be framed and gifted to their clients for Christmas 2019. Additional to this was a christmas card design, again based on wording supplied by the client.

The designs use colours from Monkey Puzzle’s existing brand palette.

I loved working on these prints! I always really enjoy hand lettering and here I’ve used a combination of drawing on the iPad pro and fine-tuning the layouts/composition on my desktop Mac. The artwork was created digitally and is in vectors, to ensure the prints were super crisp, but because of the drawing by hand aspect using the Apple Pencil, the work retains a hand-drawn feel. I like working in vectors as it provides more flexibility and makes it possible to move elements around, make edits or re-scale the artwork if needs be, without any worry of loss of resolution.

The final artwork was printed as Giclée art prints ( a very high resolution inkjet print onto archival paper, which won't fade for 100+ years!) at a 28cm x 35 cm size, by Ripe Digital

Below are my initial sketches for each piece. As for all my projects now, I work sketches up digitally on my iPad, using Procreate. This makes it easier to move elements around and play with the composition at the sketch stage and also relatively straight forward to make any changes. In this case, there were only a couple of edits made after feedback from the client, then final sketches approved before I moved onto creating the final artwork.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

My main point of contact for this project was Pia Bloom who is the Operations Manager for Monkey Puzzle. Once the project was complete, and the prints had all been framed, packed and sent out to their clients, Pia kindly agreed to give some feedback on my work, and the process we had been through together…

Why did you approach Carys to work with you, and what did you hope she would bring to the project?

We had worked with Carys before and when we were planning our next art project she was our first choice. We were confident that she would be able to come up with some creative ideas that fit our style.

How did you find the process… from the initial briefing through to completion?

Working with Carys was easy. She understood very quickly what we were looking for and her communication was always prompt and very well phased giving us enough breathing space to look through all the artwork before moving forward to the next stage. She even helped us to choose the right frames, and that made the completion seamless.

Are you happy with the final work, and what sort of feedback have you had from your clients who have received the framed prints?

We are extremely happy with the final work. Our clients have given us lovely feedback on how much they like their gift and how different it was from the usual type of gifts they have received in the past.

Finally, if you had to describe Carys to a colleague what would you say?

She is very easy to work with and she is very clear on what works and what doesn't. She is always willing to do more and offers to investigate other options and is clearly a very talented illustrator.

- Pia Bloom

Head of Operations, Monkey puzzle

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