Morecambe Carnival just days away.

One of the three peep boards created for the Morecambe Carnival

Fingers crossed for perfect weather because it’s the Morecambe Carnival this weekend in it’s second year. It was fantastic last year and the organisers are hoping to better it. Knight Time Creations was hired to add a touch of colour to the festivities with some traditional sea side peek boards. The three boards, each measuring four foot by eight foot, took over 16 hours to design and paint. We kept the costs down by just buying five tins of paint, red, yellow, blue, black and white and mixing the colours together as and when needed.
All the black line work was completed using a Letraset marker pen, which I bought from the lovely Studio Arts on North Road in Lancaster. My trusty colleague Jon Bailey and I worked tirelessly to finish the three boards in time for the big weekend.
One board is a typical sea side poster design of a curvy lady and a skinny man, the second board is a Punch and Judy show in full swing and the third is a tribute to Morecambe’s favourite son, Eric, in his well known pose from the statue on the sea front.
I’ll be attending the carnival on both days offering hand drawn temporary tattoos from my stall in the retail area near to the Midland Hotel.

The tattoo stall at the Morecambe Carnival

Advertisement

An Exciting Trip To Birmingham

Yey!! Happy days.

I’m pleased as punch. Last Thursday I was at a fantastic get together in Birmingham, it’s an annual networking meet up for all the winners of Theo Paphitis’ Small Business Sunday people. For anyone who doesn’t know about this I’ll quickly try and explain, basically it’s all on Twitter for a start, as a former member of the Dragons’ Den team Theo was often getting messages from people about their business ideas or ventures or whatever. He decided it would be a good idea to get people to focus all of these messages within an appointed time at an appointed day each week, so it’s between 5 and 7pm on a Sunday evening, you send him a message with the hashtag #SBS included about your business and then the following night at 8pm he retweets six of those messages to him enormous amount of followers, generating fame and interest in those six companies.

So, he got together with some business sponsors and they set up and organised this massive convention for all the winners to be able to get together, meet each other in person, receive award certificates and meet Theo. It was held at the ICC in Birmingham, a large and splendid place that does a lot of events. They really pushed the boat out in my humble opinion, they gave everyone a name badge on arrival and then started serving teas, coffees and biscuits. Then moments later, they got out the wine and beer too – which to be truthful, a lot of people just weren’t ready for at 11.30am. Then they brought out tray after tray of sandwiches, nibbles, quiches, cakes and gorgeous macaroons. We were blown away by the splendour. We did our best to network and mingle with the 900 other people in the room before taking our seats for the speakers. The sponsors had their moments to chat to us before finally the man himself was introduced onto the stage, Theo Paphitis. Everyone was very excited and pleased to see him, and he was a really nice guy too. Chatty, friendly, nothing was too much trouble. People were asking him all sorts of things during the question time and he was really going out of his way to be as accommodating as he could be.

He was very inspiration with his speeches, saying about how we should be getting out there and making a success out of our businesses, how he built a business from nothing during a recession and we can do anything we put our minds to – that kind of thing. It was really motivational for me and I hope I can bring it to bear on my business in some way and really move forwards and upwards.

The rest of the event was equally brill, I had my photo taken with Theo when I got my certificate, went to a couple of advisor sessions with some of the top people from Rymans and other big companies. It was brilliant, I collected many business cards, met scores of interesting people from a diverse range of businesses. I felt a little overwhelmed with the sheer volume of people, and I think I only managed to work up the nerve to talk to about 1% of those who were there, but I hope that quality and not quantity is what counts.

Apparently there’s going to be one every year, so I’m really keen to relive the experience that’s for sure, it was brill!

Market Trading

I felt like I was on “The Apprentice”! I got into the city centre around 8am. Which is early for me to be in town, but it wasn’t early for all the experienced trades-people. They’d been there since six, fitting their stalls together, setting up their tables and displaying their wares. They all had vans or trailers, I had to borrow the boot space of a kind volunteer and their car. The very kind owner of the Little Sweet Shop Company loaned me a spare gazebo, which he even helped me to set up too. What a nice man! Once the gazebo was up I then spent about half an hour or so putting up my fold out table, getting out my stock, setting it up and generally faffing around with the placement and display. Which I kept on tweaking throughout the entire day. I watched the early morning stream of pedestrians go back and forth. An average of 23 people passed in front of the stall every single minute in the morning, that definitely increased as the day went on. It was Saturday after all. Soon town was heaving with shoppers and students and every one in between. There must have been thousands of people going past over the course of the day. The early morning shoppers weren’t up for browsing or deviating from their plans, they clearly had somewhere to be or something specific to buy and they had eyes only for that. Everyone else was probably still at home having a weekend lie in. It wasn’t until lunchtime that the browsers emerged and saw the new stall in Lancaster market. People really seemed to like my “geek chic” merchandise, and a lot of people didn’t realise that I’d actually designed everything myself. One browser asked me “do you do any One Direction t-shirts?”, alas, I’m afraid not. It was a great day, chatted to a lot of people, gave out many, many business cards and leaflets. Saw plenty of people that I knew and many more that I didn’t, the weather was pleasant too – which helped. Eventually the day ended and I packed everything back up again, happily there was a lot less to put away. If I had a van, and a gazebo, and I could drive, and I had free time – then I’d definitely do it again. As it stands though, I’m not going to appear regularly, but I’ll let you know if I’ve got any special market days planned. The next time I’ll be behind a stall will be at the Kendal comic art festival on the 18th and 19th October. 🙂

The Metamorpolitan Exhibition

Official Press Release
Saturday 1st June saw the opening of an exciting month long art exhibition in Lancaster City Library.  The “Metamorpolitan” exhibition by local artist Jack Knight was officially opened by Madam Mayor June Ashworth, accompanied by her daughter the Lady Mayoress, Alex Ashworth.  Over sixty guests arrived for a champagne reception at 7pm and had just a short time to peruse the artwork on display before Madam Mayor arrived to officially declare the event open by cutting a pink ribbon.

Vibrant pink and black was the main theme of the reception, and by a happy coincidence, the Lady Mayoress had chosen the same colour scheme for her outfit!  Madam Mayor said in her opening speech that she was delighted to see such a wonderful array of vibrant artwork, and that she was equally delighted that such an event was taking place in Lancaster.

Jack Knight the artist and organiser of Metamorpolitan thanked Madam Mayor for opening the exhibition and expressed his gratitude to his sponsors, family and friends for their help and support.  Jack also thanked the library staff for their invaluable assistance in setting up the event.

After the speeches, the champagne glasses were refilled, the canapés unveiled and the guests were able to leisurely examine the Metamorpolitan paintings in greater detail.  Within a short time, four paintings had been sold and a number of orders had been placed for prints.

Jack was delighted with the successful unveiling of Metamorpolitan.  The exhibition will be running at Lancaster City Library for the next three days, and there are still a handful of original artworks available for sale. Jack is focusing on his illustration business, Knight Time Creations, for the present but hasn’t ruled out the possibility of another exhibition next year.

 _____________________________

Prologue

A selection of delicious canapes

What an awesome exhibition it was! A fantastic launch party. Everything went to plan, which was jolly good because I’d spent long enough planning the thing. I had an itinerary and timings set out, everything was in place and everyone pulled together. I couldn’t have done it without all of the tireless help of the people that rallied round to give me a hand, I was really touched so many people cared so much about me and my exhibition. Over sixty guests turned up, including the Mayor and Mayoress, the wine flowed and the canapes were delicious.

I even got a bunch of bright pink helium balloons and inked my logo onto each one of them, they looked fab’. I put some nice relaxing music on the sound system and arranged the tables and chairs into cozy clusters for the guests to sit and chill out if they wanted to. It was a magical night, I was walking on air. And I sold a few paintings too, which was marvelous. I’d like to have another exhibition, maybe next year, I’ll have to wait and see.

“Getting Seen” Workshop Coming Soon

The Lancaster Guardian this Thursday ran a little article about an upcoming business support workshop entitled “Getting Seen”. It’s going to be at The Storey Institute in Lancaster on Thursday 13th February, if you think your business needs a little marketing boost then it might be worth investing in attending this course. It’s rather pricey at £150, but it does take all day, you get to choose two out of four of the workshops on offer, plus you get refreshments, plus you get a corporate photo head shot that you can use in your marketing literature, or you can get a cartoon drawn version. Or if you’ve got time, probably both! PLUS they’re also offering follow on support after the day is over.

If you’re interesting in finding out more or booking to join then you can sign up here: http://gettingseenmasterclass.eventbrite.co.uk/

Why do I mention all this? You ask. Well, because who do think will be doing all the cartoon avatar drawing? Ah, now you get it! Sketch you later…

Happy New Year Everyone

So ends 2012, we’ve had our ups and we’ve had our downs, and I hope they overall it’s been a good year for you.

It’s been pretty good over here I’m happy to say, and now it’s time to do a few new year tasks like backing up all my images again (oh how they’re growing!), get my accounts up to date, look forward at what my plans are for 2013 and what business targets are achievable, and also look back at 2012. See where I went wrong, see where I went right.

I’ve had some great fun this last year, some pretty interesting commissions, like the shotgun box packaging marketed towards female hunters, or the lovely and colourful mango lassi recipe which was amazingly fun to design, I’ve done some portraits for an assortment of people, designed a wicked search engine for Waxamomo and created some fab steampunk cats.

If I had to choose, and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway, I think one of my favourite commissions this year was the one I got from Protect Your Bubble, partly because it was quirky and fun and but also partly because it was my first commission for a really big company, they’ve been on the telly and everything!

So here’s the link to my illustrations on their website, now I’m going to go do a happy dance and sing Auld Lang Syne.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

http://ukblog.protectyourbubble.com/news/page/2/