Lucia Vinti is the New Talent winner of the Design, Product & Packaging Category. Here, she tells us more about her award-winning project and future plans.

The project was to do the illustrations for the family guide for Tate Britain’s Van Gogh exhibition. The leaflet is a concertina that represents the different rooms in the exhibition. I was contacted by Kirsteen McSwein from the learning department at Tate after she saw my self initiated illustrations of Tate Britain.

Brief

The brief was to draw characters interacting with the Van Gogh artworks, as well as drawing frames and backgrounds. I also did a lot of hand lettering for this project.

Research

I did a lot of visual research – drawing different characters to try and get people with real personality. I had recently finished a university project about museums where I did a lot of people watching and took a tonne of photos of museums, so this came in really handy!

Materials

I used a mixture of colouring pencil (Faber-Castell Polychromos and Caran D’ache Supracolor Soft) and Tombow brush pens. I did my sketches using procreate but the finals were all done by hand and scanned in.

Process

The booklet is full of small activities and questions about the work, so I made my illustrations reflect these. For example, on the page for Starry Night, I have drawn the painting lit up by a single spotlight, and on a page about Van Gogh’s exhibitions being popular and busy there’s a character peeking through a  crowd to see an artwork.

Challenges

Doing the project alongside my University work was a challenge, but definitely worth it!

Insights

This was one of my first proper commissions so it taught me a lot.  It taught me how to apply the creative thinking that I’d learnt at university to a more specific brief, how to play around with texture and colour, and made me practice drawing children and young people (something I had avoided until this point!).

Numbers

I did 13 drawings of picture frames, and about 40,000 copies were printed (which I still find amazing!).

Reflections

I would have made some of the illustrations slightly neater, but overall I think the very hand done style works.

Advice

Super cliched, but make the work you want to be paid for, and hopefully one day it will happen! I feel very lucky to have done this project and that the right people happened to see and enjoy my work, but that luck wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t done lots of personal work about museums. Also just believe in yourself (or at least pretend to!) and don’t see yourself as an amateur, no matter what stage in your career you are at.

Future

I’m currently writing and illustrating my first children’s book which is really exciting!

Dream Commission

My dream commissions are a recipe book, travel illustrations for a company like Eurostar and more arts education projects

Favourite thing to draw

I really like drawing people in turtlenecks and fancy picture frames

Workspace

I currently work from home, I made a nice big desk by sticking a large bit of plywood on my old Ikea desk. I have a big wall of postcards and other inspiration, and many many plants. Sadly I have no pets, but a friendly neighbourhood cat keeps coming to visit and keep me company. I’m hoping to move into a studio space in the next few months.

Thanks

Thank you so much to Kirsteen from Tate for doing this cool project with me and taking a chance on me when I was still a student!  And thank you to my brilliant pals and parents for constantly hyping me up and being so lovely. I really wasn’t expecting to win, it’s such a great surprise!