Vicky Yorke Designs

Happy New Year everyone! I thought I would begin the new year by revisiting a project from this time last year! Regular followers of my blog may remember me talking about getting my paint brushes out for a really fun brief. As always with product development it's taken a while, but I can now share with you that these designs were to be part of a new range of mugs. The first mug captures the ever popular subject of British birds ( - one of my favourite subjects to draw and paint!) ... and the second mug, which I call 'Haberdashery' captures the current British trend for all things craft. I originally painted the design in a vintage colour pallet of red, blue and beige, but Kitchen Craft asked me to digitally recolour it to be more of a pinky / purple colour pallet and this was used on the final design above.  Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2014.

We also wanted our wedding breakfast to be extremely personal and to reflect our personalities. For me that of course was all about colour and pattern! I loved the idea of creating a village fair / country kitchen vintage style with florals and polka dots and subtle clashes that somehow just went together! My wonderful Nan made the table cloths, we bought crockery from charity shops and used mismatched paper napkins by the amazing  Cath Kidston to create the effect.  To make it even more personal to us and to keep with the country theme, we named each table after chicken breeds, which included breeds of chickens that we were keeping in our garden at the time. (Although, sadly since the wedding we have lost our lovely chickens to a fox :( ) I created the above designs as table markers, as well as the below wedding favour, which was printed on special flower seed paper and linked to the wedding stationery from earlier in the day to give each of our

As we enter the second part of the year many suppliers and retailers are getting ready to launch new product ranges. I'm delighted to tell you that I have lots of new products that will be launched in the coming weeks and months, but before that happens I thought that I would share with you some of my favourite designs that didn't make the final cut. The above designs were proposed girl's stationery designs for high street supplier Helix. I especially enjoyed working on the Rawsharc design, which has a lovely 1950's feel - so on trend at the moment! I also had great fun with the folkloric style tree print - It's very simple, but really 'pops' in the neon colourway! And above are my favourite proposed boy's designs, which aren't to be! :)

I have several projects on the go at the moment involving bird designs, so I've decided to set myself the challenge of at least one bird drawing every day until I've got all I need. The above is a bit of a sneaky-peek at what I've done so far...