Design industry practice
Designer Case Study – Leah Hume
We welcome our month of August Artist and Designer Leah Hume to Coffee for the People Roasting Co. with her exhibition Botanical Disco.
This is Leah’s second exhibition hosted at Coffee for the People, and we are so happy to welcome her back.
Leah is particularly special to us, as earlier this year she designed our store vouchers and t-shirts.
Tell us a little about your Art and Design making background
My number 1 passion has always been drawing and illustration. Growing up I always knew my ideal job would be where I can draw and be creative for a living.
After studying an amazing illustration course I decided to establish my own freelance illustration side hustle, where I brought people’s special memories to life – which felt incredibly rewarding and fulfilling. I decided to go back and study graphic design as I wanted more creative career opportunities and soon realised that illustration and graphic design go hand in hand perfectly.
How do you make your Art and Design work? Tell us a bit about the process.
At the moment I’m loving the Procreate program on my iPad, that’s how I created the artwork for ‘Botanical Disco’. Doing digital illustration gives you the chance to use an endless array of brushes and pencils to create highly realistic and detailed artwork – I used a few ‘pencil’ brushes (on Procreate) for this body of work and the quality of utilising these digital tools meant it came out looking like I drew these pieces with real pencil and paper. The benefit to drawing/painting digitally is that you have so much control over how it’s executed and you can even manipulate the size, thickness and even pressure sensitivity with your stylus/pen (and if you make a mistake you can always press undo!).
When I’m not digitally illustrating, I do love traditional pencil and paper, I enjoy experimenting with graphite/fine-liner (sometimes watercolour) and combining traditional methods with digital. Sometimes I might scan a drawing and either digitally colour it or add other elements – I love turning my hand-drawn pieces into repeat patterns too.
Over the years I have always loved exploring and experimenting with the themes of identity, nature and flora and fauna.
How do you develop your Art and Design skills?
I’ve been drawing since I was a child, but during secondary school, I always chose and invested myself in art and design subjects. After completing school, I decided to study visual art at Melbourne Polytechnic and also completed their illustration course – this was where I really honed my passion and was able to develop multiple and valuable skill sets within visual art. I was able to do amazing things like life drawing, printmaking, learning how to develop photos traditionally, and even develop a body of work which would be exhibited through a student-run exhibition.
Learning all the different ways of how illustration can be created and made for the commercial and non-commercial world really helped me decide what I wanted to do with my skills and passion for creativity.
Two years later I decided to study graphic design at Box Hill Institute and learnt how to integrate my illustrative skills and train my creative eye for the commercial world – learning illustration and graphic design both have helped to continuously develop my artistic skills.
Why do you make this type of Art and Design?
I decided to create ‘Botanical Disco’ because I really wanted to improve my realistic drawing and rendering skills. I wanted to flesh out some details that I appreciate within nature and actually spend a decent amount of time trying to develop my attention to detail. I love drawing realistically but find it is very time consuming and hard to fit in (when you work full time), however this exhibition gave me the opportunity to develop illustrations more on the fine-art side of things rather than simple quick illustrations that I have done in the past.
It gave me a chance to sit down, take time and explore detail in a way I haven’t allowed myself to before. I’m also used to creating my art in black and white with little to no colour, so ‘Botanical Disco’ was the perfect contrast to my usual minimalist ways.
What does art mean to you?
I love to get lost in a drawing or pattern, illustrating something in detail and building it from scratch can be not only rewarding creatively but quite relaxing and meditative for my mind too.
What Inspires you and your Designs?
I’m inspired by many things, mostly nature, fashion, photography, pop culture, music and also other artists/designers.
I find my inspiration through old art magazines that I’ve kept over the years and what other creatives are doing on things sites like Pinterest. I’m still early in my career/journey, developing who I am as an artist and designer, so I love to research and see what successful creative people are doing within their practice.
I’m inspired by amazing artists and designers like Kelly Thompson, Yayoi Kusama, Hayley O’ Connor, and Abi Connick.
What does your Art and Design work mean to you?
My art is a creative journey. It can be personal and reveal my own perspective on how I see things. Sometimes it’s not so deep, I do like to draw things I simply find pretty or visually interesting. Despite drawing for years, I’m very much still developing my personal style and find a lot of satisfaction in experimenting.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Earlier in 2022 Leah Hume designed the T-Shirts and Store Vouchers for CFTP Roasting Co. We chatted to Leah to find out more about the design process for this project.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Leah Hume + CFTP Roasting Co. The Design Process, The Brief, Methods + Materials & Final Presentations
What was the process behind designing the store vouchers and T-Shirts?
Last year I was completing my advanced diploma of graphic design and one of the units involved finding actual clients that needed design work. This was a great chance for me to get real industry experience on a project that would be used in the real world. I contacted Skye from CFTP as she had already hosted a solo exhibition of mine back in 2016.
CFTP needed some new store voucher designs for the store as well as T-shirts for the staff to wear and to sell to the customers.
How did you work with the client – Coffee for the People Roasting Co, to design the T-shirts/store vouchers? What was there a brief?
A design proposal was emailed through which outlines the project including sections like ‘target audience’, ‘look and feel of brand’, ‘requirements and specifications’, ‘keyword’ and ‘deadline’ all filled out by CFTP.
CFTP. already had some coffee bag packaging designed by another graphic designer and the brief was to incorporate that same style of illustration in both the T-shirt designs and vouchers.
The coffee bean plant was the main focus on the packaging and was to be carried over into my designs using the same type of hand-drawn line art look in white paired with the purple navy colour. Skye also outlined what information she wanted on the store vouchers and the kind of look she was after.
Design options were emailed through, refined and narrowed down with feedback from CFTP. Virtual mock ups were sent of how design options would look to see the designs in context.
Final Presentations
Once designs were finalised, Skye organised printing and production for both vouchers and T-shirts. It was really satisfying seeing my designs in the flesh and out there in the real world!
You can find Leah here, or follow her on Insta @leahhume.art
