Sleep gone to the devil? It’s horrible, but this is what’s been helping me.

 

From ‘Only If You Dare’ - illustration by me, for Josh Allen’s book. I know just how this poor little lad feels! ©Sarah J. Coleman

Oh no...I'm awake.

My sleep disruption began many months ago as a product of, I think, a combination of pandemic, work anxieties, and a major hormonal re-wiring (the whole dashboard out, y’know the kind).

I would get to sleep just fine, but wakefulness would boot me out of my slumber every single night, always around 3am, and last anywhere from an hour to…the rest of the night.

I’m my own boss, which means that technically I can ‘get up when I want’, but I really can’t; I still have a full 8+ hours of work every single day, clients depending on me, and the other, myriad responsibilities that come with running a small company. And the later I would get up, the worse I felt — physically and emotionally, since there’s still a stigma attached to ‘people who get up late’ — and the more I worried about the whole thing.

I recently shared a couple of things on social media and in my regular newsreel which clearly rang a bell with a lot of people, so I’m sharing and expanding on those things here.

So, the causes of waking up I couldn’t do an awful lot about, but I could control how I felt before I went to sleep, during wakefulness and during the day. I quickly established that late caffeine was one factor (after about 20 years of being completely caffeine free, I’d gradually discovered the joys of strong fresh-ground coffee again over lockdown). So no coffee after 2pm — 3m at a push. After that, all-decaf-everything.

The I worked out that I was eating too late at night — has to be before 8pm now — ideally at 7 — or I really am affected. Your poor body’s trying to digest when you should be asleep!

THEN I realised I was still on my phone answering email and messages late at night, sometimes actually in bed — in my book, that’s a a dirty habit, but one I found I’d slacked into (that’s why they call it ‘sleep hygiene’).

And finally, I clicked that I wasn’t getting enough fresh air during the day; I’m a lifelong gym-goer but it’s not the same as the outdoors and vitamin D, so I started walking. A LOT. Didn’t matter when — sometimes a ‘commute to work’ walk of a mile, sometimes a mid-afternoon one of 3 miles or more, sometimes one of those plus another mile just before bed, or just a tiny ten minute walk by itself last thing, if I really couldn’t manage to get out in the daytime. Walking is famously underrated, and it comes with the opportunity for thinking time, podcasts, checking out some new music, or just silence.

And this bit is important:

I realised that when I was waking up (always around 3am) I was bothered and anxious — but I wasn’t waking up BECAUSE I was bothered and anxious, I was anxious because I had found myself suddenly awake. I changed my mindset (which took a little while) and flipped it around, so that when I would find myself awake, instead of going “ohhh nooooo I’m awake this is hell not this again I don’t want to be” I would blink a bit and go, “oh, ok! Looks like I’m awake. OK; no bother. We’ve been here before. You woke up because you were just a bit hot/thirsty/uncomfortable. Have a drink of water, shuffle about, maybe go for a wee, try again.”

And THAT last change has made the biggest difference. I don’t fret about it any more, and I remind myself that in the middle of the night, because you have no other distractions — even simple visual distractions like other people and your surroundings — your mind focuses entirely on what it’s worrying about, so those things seem HUGE and insurmountable.

And they are not!

If I really, truly cannot get back to sleep, I get up and try to sleep somewhere else — one of the sofas, I’ve even tried the cool living room floor — or in extreme circumstances I go to my desk because I may as well be doing ‘something’. But I don’t set my expectation too high; doing any little job in the middle of the night is a bonus, but your aim is to get into bed and back to sleep.

©Sarah J. Coleman

The other important realisation that unfolded over time was that a good night starts with a good evening.

These are the steps we take now, to make sure we give ourselves the best chance of sleeping, and staying asleep. These aren’t ads, by the way; they’re just what we use, and what we like. No-one has paid me to write this! (I don’t do that, before anyone else asks).

1. No caffeine after 2pm.
OK 3 at a push, but anything after that will probably cost you in the small hours!

2. A couple of hours before bed: hot chocolate with reishi mushroom and ashwaganda.
Both help the body to unwind and get ready for sleep. You don’t need to add sugar, but we add a dash of maple syrup.

3. If hot chocolate’s too much for that time of night, we swear by Pukka ‘Sleepy Tea’

4. About half an hour before bed: a couple of Lemellos.
These little all-natural capsules take the edge off the white noise of anxiety and worries safely, and without any after/side effects (and no dependency issues).

5. I’ll have my earphones next to me in bed in case I wake up, and if I do I’ll listen to some rain sounds (very soothing, especially for someone like me who loves any tale beginning with ‘it was a dark and stormy night’) or do some breathing.

They both sound a bit clichéd, but there’s a reason for that — they work!

Remember: this is just what’s worked for me, over two years or so of trial and error, and changing one thing at a time then observing the result. Some of these might work for you too. They might not, but give them a go!

Hope it helps.

Sleeping…but awake...but OK with it, actually. ©Sarah J. Coleman

If you're not driving a BMW by the time you're 24...

~ Visual Communcation BA (Hons.) Class of 1993; BIAD's Gosta Green site ~

My university tutor, colleague and leader of the degree course that set me on my path, Bal Nandra, died on Monday morning. That's him leaning on the railings, big watch, big glasses.

I write this with still-surprised eyebrows, because it doesn't seem like enough time has passed for this to be a reality. I graduated from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 1993, with a first in Visual Communication, a special award for typographic innovation and a strange and ambitious portfolio that no-one really knew what to do with, filled with lettering, 3D sculptures, ink stuff and theatrical vigour. 

Bal told me and my mate Mel, also on the course, that 'illustrators don't get firsts'.  Naturally that triggered our silent 'Watch This' response [read that in the Brummie accent we would both have had at the time; hers authentic, mine unconsciously adopted over the terms]. Actually, neither of us were that fussed about a grade, wanting to just do our best and find our direction, until at some point we were threatened (again by Bal) with the dangling carrot of 'if you keep this up ladies, you're on track for a first'. 

No pressure then.

As well as the cold dread of being summoned to his office at the end of the studio for unknown misdemeanours or feedback was the gameshow-feel thrill of being late to a briefing (think Squid Game rather than Countdown) which Mel and I were, often. Sometimes because we had done the obligatory all-nighter to meet a deadline, sometimes because we were skip-diving for that precious mineral 'foamboard', chunks of which would be thrown with wanton disregard for its cost into the college bins, or scrap metals we could fashion our mad built things from.

Sometimes we were late because we were getting a toffee flapjack and more tea from the canteen. 

And sometimes, we just hid because, being diligent students, it would be in our direction that any extra-curricular or industry briefs would come hurling, Exocet-style, into an already gruelling 26-briefs-in-one-term* schedule.

Bal was also the deliverer of sobering career advice. When he told us that we could consider ourselves failures if we weren't driving a BMW by the time we were 24, we simultaneously laughed in his face and trembled with horror; we knew that was a horrifically unlikely scenario for either of us. At 24, I had a yellow 2CV that my boyfriend had cheerfully passed onto me in lieu of a weed debt someone couldn't pay him, and Mel had a Micra. Both were sound motors, but not German, and not fast. When I picked Bal up in my BMW to go for cake and coffee with our other tutor Mike Simkin, a great many years later, the joke was not lost on him. 

He was funny and strict and stern, extremely ambitious for every one of us and, though we didn't really appreciate it at the time, highly successful in his field and incredibly well-respected as a designer in his own right. He kept up this work till the very end, continuing his relationship with his alma mater Ravensbourne College, and I know I channeled a little of his knowing-wink seriousness in my own teaching, as I went on to degree and higher ed teaching sessions over the years that followed.

Thanks Bal. 

~ Balvir Singh Nandra / 25th August 1951 – 28th February 2022 ~

*True story.

~ Sarah, not about to look into the cost of a BMW, Spring 1993; grounds of BIAD's Gosta Green site ~

To My Insurance Company.

I've been engaged in a battle to renew my business insurance lately. It's gone on for an unbelievably long time, because I can't find anyone to insure us properly.

When asked about the reasons why companies are - I'm going to say 'scared' - to insure my business, it seems to boil down to two things. 

1) The majority of my work over the last ten years or so is for North American clients. This seems to terrify them.

2) The insurers seem hell bent on protecting the mythically vulnerable from me - rather than the other way round, in a system that protects other people from being copied by me.

As most illustrators will know, we are most at risk from being ripped off by a third party - including large companies and startlingly high-profile corporations who ought to know better (we all know who I'm talking about, insert your own anecdote here) than we are at risk of plotting to rip them off, or each other.

These things are new. Or maybe they only seem new; when I reflect on it, there's been a growing sense of anxiety in the voices of those I speak to every time I ring up for annual insurance. It explains why I've moved companies so often. It contextualises why I'm constantly getting new quotes, from fewer and fewer companies. And it reveals an increasingly protect-the-big-guys modus operandi; if a missed deadline means Acme PLC can't make their print date, if Josephine Bloggs thinks I've copied one of their images, if XYZ Corporation has to clean paint up off their floor on one of the astonishingly rare occasions I have to work on-site, they're protected - what I mean is, I'll get help from my insurance company to defend myself, as long as whoever I need to defend myself against is in the UK, of course.

But as the explicit and very focussed questioning of each company I've spoken with has revealed, if I see someone using or copying my work commercially, their insurance policy affords me no protection.

In a nut shell, they don't have my back.

This might seem like moaning, but it is not. This is my business, built up over almost 30 years, and heavily, deeply invested in, year on year, not only materially, but emotionally and spiritually, and with an incalculable amount of hard work. When I hand over money to protect that investment, I expect more than my iPad and my paper stacks to be protected.

The reason this issue creeps beyond the scope of the mere mathematical technicality of insuring a few Apple devices and a load of inks against fire or theft is because it speaks to the much larger issue of copyright theft, and image and style misappropriation, an article about which I've been sketching out for months. Why are insurers more nervous about me stealing a company's work? Why is there a chilly gaping hole where there should be a policy that kicks in to help me take action the moment a serious IP theft is discovered and the infringer decides, for once, to fight back?

No, really, it's OK; I've paid four figures for a 'comprehensive' insurance policy, but you sit back lads; I'll tackle that one myself, especially the new NFT 'company' who've decided to mint my work for their own profits (true story).

Now, of course it's my job and my responsibility to take all the available steps to make sure my work is 'protected', so that I don't need to take action against anyone. It's quite literally part of my job; reading the contracts; knowing what I'm signing; reading the NDAs. Use lo-res images online and watermark and make online images non-grabable if you must, but none of these things will protect an image from being misappropriated, whether that's reproduced through mimicry or used and applied wholesale. People who aren't so intimate with the subject will talk sympathetically but a little glibly about 'registering' the copyright of an image, but copyright is covered by the Berne Convention; the right to be identified as the creator of your own work at the point of creation, rather than as a result of 'registering' it in some way, is a human right.

One or two companies said they would insure me to make a claim - but only if, like me, the infringing party was based in the UK. To date, I've had infringements in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Germany - and just one or two in the UK. And those are the ones I know about.

So why isn't that taken into consideration when a company draws up an insurance policy for a creative business? Perhaps I'm being too picky; I can certainly be that. But it just feels like an absolute basic protection in the contemporary creative market.

Here's the email I sent to the most recent insurance company I spoke with at length. I was fed up with saying the same things, and I decided to write it down so they could actually address the problems within their policies.

Whether they read it or not I have no idea; the courtesy of a response wasn't forthcoming.

But I'm posting it here and sharing it in on order that other companies, who might actually offer positively evolved, customer-centric policies which are different from those I've dived into thus far, can talk to me if they see fit. 

And having learned during the course of my research that a great many illustrators have no insurance AT ALL, I'm hoping I'll hear from other creatives who have had the same problem, or are looking for insurance at the moment - and more helpfully, from people who have solved the issue with an appropriate policy.

If you have thoughts or experiences that resonate, I welcome them. In the meantime, I have my pens pencils and hardware covered, but for now, I feel that the industry is set to either put this issue even further at arm's length, as it decides it's too 'Wild West' an issue to successfully navigate/monetise, or it will be forced to evolve in a fast-moving world of NFTs, social media and visibility, and in doing so recognise what the dark matter, the heavyweight inner core of any creative business that needs protecting actually is - its creations.

Some details in this email have been slightly changed for purposes of making the scenarios easily understood by the recipients who are outside the illustration industry, and to avoid identifying individuals. 

If at times it sounds like I'm explaining what an illustrator is or does, it's because that's exactly what I've had to do. Many times over.

~ † ~

Dear Insurance Company Person,

Thank you for forwarding the documents for the policy you propose for my business, after speaking with me on the phone for forty minutes yesterday. I'm unable to accept it, because it does not cover my needs.

What’s quite bewildering at the moment is that, after almost 30 years in this trade - and I mean, wholeheartedly, professionally immersed in nothing but this trade, on a worldwide scale - I’m finding an increasing reluctance to insure me and my business. For over 20 of those years I’ve worked with American and Canadian clients, and clients elsewhere in the world, and historically it’s never been ‘a problem’ nor subject to any additional questioning or clauses.

Over the last 4-5 years I’ve seen a creeping nervousness around that, and I do not see a reason why this would be. I don’t know of a single case of an illustrator being sued - for any reason - other than by another illustrator  in cases of blatant copying. This happens - there was a case a few years ago of two American illustrators fighting it out over alleged copying, but it was eventually resolved without resort to legal means, which remains the preferred way of resolving such things. 

What I don’t see reflected in your policy, but do see happening around me frequently, is cases of the illustrator having to fight a case of having their own work infringed by companies - both small and large.

To cite one example, a couple of years ago the large high street chain **redacted but named in the email** copied a colleague’s very distinctive work; that colleague had to fight that case of (very blatant) copying, and that colleague 'dealt with it satisfactorily' and got the work withdrawn. It was 'cut and dried’. 

There are myriad examples of large clothing companies helping themselves to artists’ work online, without permission.

I myself have had to deal with over 60 copyright infringements of my work by other people to date - and I have dealt with them, successfully, without ever having to resort to legal means, because I know the business inside out and I know copyright - as it applies to my trade - inside out.

The only recent example I know of which speaks to the kind of scenario that form the basis of this particular fear from insurance companies, is this. A very, very well-known British high street chain hired a design agency (standard practice) for a campaign that involved an illustrator creating a ‘friendly monster’ for a Christmas campaign. They would have briefed the illustrator closely for such a high profile campaign, and the resulting monster, once it hit the internet, was immediately recognised as a close copy of a long-existing famous character illustrated by an equally famous illustrator.

The illustrator whose work had been copied, although within his rights to pursue the case, was maturely philosophical, resolving the issue with humour and grace:

 "Talk of legal action has flooded my Facebook feeds, but I won’t be pursuing that. Instead, I hope that advertising agencies and the big companies they work for, take care to credit creative people whose work they might reference. We have the finest children’s book writers and illustrators in the world – their work should be cherished and credited properly." 

The key issue though is even if legal action had been taken, it would have been the design agency hired by the company who was challenged, NOT the illustrator, as the design agency was responsible for the creative direction taken.

(In this case the illustrator, who was relatively inexperienced and no doubt very excited to have received the commission, was unlikely to have questioned their commissioner’s art direction.)

But if that illustrator had chosen to pursue a legal route (and presuming he has insured his business) he should surely have been able to do that with the backing and confidence of his insurers, to whom he had paid money to protect that business, the IP in which forms the substance of the business in a far more meaningful way than his easily-replaced pens and pencils.

Such cases are not common. But my point is that what I am way, way more at risk of having MY copyright infringed, than I am at risk of infringing someone else’s - my job is to create original images, and I have created thousands of them.

The other scenario an insurer might be fearful of, and one that has been posited to me many times now, is an illustrator delivering work late, and thus triggering a sequence of damaging events such as missed print deadlines. But I have never heard of this happening; when deadlines are running close, they are modified, or the work is adapted to suit the timescale, or, in some cases, a client can choose to go with an other artist or buy stock imagery to meet their deadline - there is always a way forward, and I know because I have been involved in some extremely high profile jobs with their attendant deadlines, budgets and pressures, and successfully carried out every one of them.

I’m not suggesting that legal challenges never come up, but the emphasis on a client suing an illustrator suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of the job of an illustrator and the industry at large. And this fear of legal challenges seems to be infiltrating the insurance industry, even those pitching themselves as specialists to the creative industries.

I can’t go with your policy as it’s not right for me, but I welcome the opportunity to highlight why that is, and why the thinking underpinning the policy feels flawed, and outdated.

All the best,

Sarah.

~ † ~

Why you should always pre-order a book you fancy.

When I’ve totally invested in a book via my illustrations, I want that book to do well. Not only for myself, because of course I’ll be earning a modest royalty on each sale and that is a part of how I earn a living, but because I want any author I’ve worked with to be rewarded for what will often be years of hard, dedicated work - and years, quite probably, of building up to starting it, planning, thinking, dreaming (these are the people who didn't just dream about it - they did it!)

Contrary to how it might look on the chirpy and colourful bookcentric feeds of Twitter and the ‘Gram, books do not magically spring from nowhere, fully formed with glittering covers and smiling, selfie-ready authors. By the time you see that part, the writer has spent years chipping away at a manuscript they didn’t necessarily have ANY idea would ever be published, months honing it, weeks editing it, and the illustrator has spent weeks or months working on the illustrations to go with it - and all the sketching and roughs and versions that entails. Most of the time they'll have created a cover for the book too, which often actually comes before the insides are decorated.

A cover reveal happens some time before a book’s release, to introduce the book to the world in visual form and to remind you, if you didn’t know already or had forgotten, that its publication is imminent. And again: by that time, the illustrator’s work on it will have been finished months before that moment.

And when all that's done, when the book's become 'a real object', a definite point on the horizon, authors and illustrators will encourage you to buy a copy of their book BEFORE it comes out, from the moment it’s made available to buy online. I know as a species we’re used to hitting ‘buy’ and getting the new thing thrust in our hands pretty much the day after - or even the same day, if you use a certain grotesquely popular service - and it might be an odd concept, having to wait for the thing you’ve paid for.

But that is exactly what an author and illustrator have done; just for much longer. They’ve made the investment, a substantial one at that, and they’re now waiting patiently, and probably quite nervously, for the pay-off; the sales, the reviews, the readers receiving their book and enjoying it, and the opportunity to engage with the readers for whom they’ve laboured all this time.

Here are the reasons why buying a book before publication is immeasurably important to, and massively appreciated by, authors and illustrators.

Pre-orders  (or ‘pre-sales’) are THE BIGGEST hint to booksellers that there’s interest in a book. Bookshops used to have to use a combination of educated guess, their experience and previous sales by an author, to order in the stock of books they think they can sell. Not any more. Figures from pre-sales give them a vivid picture of what readers are anticipating - and they can order in stock of it, ready to meet demand. Books without pre-orders make it difficult to size up how many to order.

Similarly, publishers need to know how many to print! Obvious, when you think about it. Although an initial print run will have been agreed months before, or even at the time of contracts being signed, no publisher wants to under-print and not be able to meet demand - selling out straight away might be a flattering surprise for an author/illustrator, but they’d rather keep selling!

By the same token, they don’t want thousands of copies too many - buying the book you fancy as a pre-order puts the publisher one book closer to getting the quantities right.

Book sellers will sometimes offer a book at a lower price prior to publication. This is likely if it’s by an author/illustrator whose work has done well, or it’s a follow-up or one in a series. Obviously this is a 'nudge’, as it’s known in retail, but you save a couple of quid/dollars by buying it early!

Pre-orders create anticipation, excitement and momentum for the book.  An author/illustrator will be getting on The Promo Train for his or her book (nope; unless you’re on the boy-wizard level of popularity, book will NOT sell themselves) which means visiting schools and libraries, doing online talks and interviews, maybe some radio or even TV; their confidence will soar as a result of knowing that, by the time they hit the road for all this, the book is actually selling decent quantities already.

Which means an engaged and engaging speaker, who is excited and confident.

When a book is in its pre-order stage, there’s every chance the author/illustrator is working on its follow-up (keeping in mind what I said above about the timescales of book-making). Nothing says ‘keep going’ like good sales on the one you’ve already done, that’s about to come out!

WORD OF MOUTH. If you’ve pre-ordered a book, it means you’re into it and excited about it - and that means you can tell other people about it, and they can pre-order it too. I mean yes, you can do that if you order it after publication, but there’s nothing quite like the gently teenage smugness of ‘psst...I know this is gonna be a good'un…and I get my copy first.'

Finally, we author/illustrators HAVE IDEAS for stuff we want to do around the book - stuff we couldn’t put IN the book itself! A pre-order campaign allows us to make those things and offer them as little creative nuggets of encouragement to the potential readers. "Buy it now, rather than waiting till publication, and we’ll send you a bunch of swag!" In the case of Josh Allen and myself, that swag consisted of enamel badges, cards, a free illustrated story and signed art prints - for the book we’re currently promoting, that’s book plates, glow in the dark badges, signed art prints and more. Since the book launches those things stop, because, of course, we can’t offer them to every single buyer!

Think of it as not only your reward for having faith that what we’ve made will be ace, but your badge to show you’ve been inducted into our little gang of like-minded, book loving people.

And what could be nicer than that?

You can pre-order 'Only If You Dare' by Josh Allen & Sarah J Coleman in the UK and the US here.

And you can still get the some of the swag for Out To Get You, here.

Fire, Pencils & Gold

We're doing a lot of re-organising and rethinking of the space we work in at the moment. It was subject to a massive redesign ten years ago but is starting to feel a bit stale (lockdown helped with that!) and this corner in particular has never been quite right.

We've worked with Spencer Jenkins before on projects around the studio and the house, and when we realised it was shelving that we needed - for all the reference books, novels, catalogues and such, housed for years in repurposed wooden apple crates - we asked him. He loves wood, works in steel and willow, and creates natural forms and shapes which look simple and easy, but he'll pore over a line for for days on end, perfecting it.

We'd been admirers of the work he's done in scorched larch, taking the wood and burning its surface till it reaches a deep, satisfying black. We chose chunky larch sections which were cut and planed to fit the totally asymmetrical and wobbly corners of the room (the studio is L-shaped).

Once this was done - not a fast stage, it should be said, Spence is something of a perfectionist - the larch is burnt using a blowtorch and a steady hand. You can see the really gnarly, delicate-looking surface of the larch, which truly looks as if you've turned up to a house fire hours too late. And it smells like that too, if you get your nose right in there - an oddity exciting smell, proper 'charred'.

After the charring, comes the vanishing - but sensitively done, so as not to obliterate the textures of the burning with a brutal slathering of shiny. Wet here, the varnish soaks in to 'fix' the burnt surface:

Burnt only on the underside and the sides, leaving natural larch exposed on the surface where the books would sit, from here the shelves were brought to the studio where it was over to me. We'd come up with the idea of filling any natural cracks and splits with gold. 

Inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, mending precious time-served items with gold and honouring their long service rather than throwing them away or trying to hide the breaks, I first photographed the shelves placed in situ and drew lines as organically as I could over the edges, many times over, till I hand line that neither told a story nor suggested any deliberate sequence, taking my cue from Spencer himself and the notion of a totally random break or split: harder than I first thought! 

In fact, it took me two weeks to arrive at a set of 'cracks' I was happy with, and even then, I changed them as I worked. 

I tested the infill of gold with the samples that Spencer had made for us, in the process of assessing how much to burn into the wood, by Dremelling the splits in and applying both gold leaf and two gold acrylics. The idea was to fill with actual gold, via melting and pouring in, or alternatively using a rod that's melted in (NOT the correct technical term) but after research this proved both financially and technically very difficult to achieve without the input of a jeweller and specialist kit, so we decided on 23ct gold leaf - the quality of leaf above which no oxidisation takes place, and suitable for outdoor use as well as indoor.

IN THE MEANTIME...the empty space where the old crate shelves were stacked was looking sad, so it was given a fresh coat of ECOS white paint, and I added a set of coloured pencils to it! I sketched them out on paper with felt tips in what felt like the right colours, squatting and holding them up against the corner, until they were right.

Feeling like a big child it was massively freeing to paint something large-scale on the wall - we haven't done that for AGES - and I added some pencils which were sharp, a snapped one, a blunt one and some sharpened with a knife - like a real pencil collection.

Once this was done it was time to gild. Gilding requires the surface to be smooth, sealed and dry, before a coat of size - a type of glue which doubles as a varnish, and remains sticky for a few hours - is applied, followed by the leaf itself. Every crack was Dremelled in, slowly and with a non-blinking steady hand, brushed clean with a stiff brush, and then sealed with a PVA solution. When dry, a layer of Stuart Semple's 'Goldest Gold' acrylic was applied, chosen for being the truest, richest gold I've ever come across.

The acrylic acts as a sealant, and ensured that should any area not be completely covered by the gold leaf, all you'll see is the convincingly-gold acrylic edge. I highly recommend his very special gold!

And then the gold leaf.

A time-consuming process (if it wasn't already!) the leaf is applied with a dry brush over size applied anywhere from an our beforehand. As long as it's still sticky, you can start gilding. A little section of VERY flaky gold leaf is picked up on a dry brush, and pushed into the crack, tamped down carefully with the same dry brush - never with fingers.

Despite a surprisingly modest spend on the 23ct gold, I ALMOST left the acrylic exposed, such was its goodness and glitter. here's the acrylic on the left, and some of the gilding on the right. There's just more...goldness to the gold leaf!

Finally, the completed shelves were fixed in place over the pencils, burnt, gold edges facing into the room, and the books have been making their way onto them this week; stylishly re-organised for the first time in years!

We're grateful to Spence for his painstaking work, carried out in a distanced, awkward masks-and-googles-on way in the middle of a lockdown, and for the opportunity for another collaboration. The next project is already underway, and we already know there'll be more after that!

You can explore more of Spencer's work on his Instagram account.