One of the lovely, sometimes unseen, characteristics of Winchester is the classic shop signs in the city centre. One of my favourite examples is situated at the top of the High Street. It belongs to Warren & Son and it happens to be one of the oldest businesses in town. Their pen and quill stationers token is part advertisement and part sculpture. It obviously caught my eye a while back, as it features in my growing collection of paper cut paintings!
Warren & Son have also been a regular stockist for my cards and calendars. So I was delighted to be asked to contribute artwork to a new paper bag design, featuring that amazing sign! It needed to be fairly simple with its lines and monochrome to work across the brown paper surface. I think the brief lent itself nicely to a letterpress style illustration. You can see what I came up with below, drawn directly in Adobe Fresco on my iPad. We had a couple of subtle variations, adjusting the relative size of the bracket. But we came pretty quickly to what I felt was a lovely clean composition. It looks balanced and catches the eye when printed on the bag.
I was very pleased how the paper bag turned out and ran along as quickly as I could to pick up a sample! Thank you to Chris at Warren & Son for commissioning. If you’d like to work with me on a similar project, please drop me a line.
