Love Oxford: Illustrator Sarah Hoyle

Throughout the summer months I spotted gorgeous posters for a local music night, Irregular Folk, around and about town and online. Then, shortly after, another familiar looking poster design emerged promoting a music festival, and then another for a different music night. The images were sticking in my mind, so I did a little bit of digging (read: Googling) and discovered that all these cool, vivid and playful posters were by illustrator Sarah Hoyle. Not only had she impressed me with those memorable, colourful posters, but Sarah is also the artist behind the artwork of my friends’ band, – one of their singles was in fact her first commission as an illustrator! So, enough said, I had to get in touch and find out more.

Sarah actually, modestly, says that she has become an illustrator slightly by accident, “I think I’ve been learning as I’ve been going along.” She studied Furniture Design, “But always enjoyed the drawing side a bit more than the making bit.” When she finished university she went straight to work for Charlie Whinney, an artist creating unusual wooden steam-bent furniture and sculptures – they once made a huge window display at Harvey Nicholls, which Sarah also got to illustrate! “Charlie was great to work with as he wasn’t too precious and let me try out lots of things. It was also stimulating to work on a large scale and take on exciting projects then later work out how in fact we could do them.”

She then went and worked for a graphic designer specialising in book design, which had much stricter briefs and was all about the tiny details and microscopic accuracy, “It was a really good learning experience, but wasn’t quite how I wanted to work.” Now Sarah designs book covers (much more imagery, much less nit-picky type setting) for a publishing company, and fits in all her freelance illustrating around her day job.

Originally from Abingdon, Sarah and has spent most of her life in Oxford, apart from when at university and a stint in Norwich where she learnt screen-printing, something that impacted quite a bit on her practice. “I started drawing with the idea that I was then going to print the illustration, so I made my lines a bit cleaner and was thinking a lot more about a finished design as I drew. Nowadays all of my designs start being hand drawn and then I will put things together through Photoshop, but it’s important to me that things look hand drawn as I like that aesthetic. I don’t want things to look completely clean or completely perfect.”

Looking through Sarah’s portfolio you notice there is a series of designs for bands and lots of music related events. When she was starting out her friends in bands would ask her to design for them, and then her name got around the Oxford music scene so larger organisations like Oxjam and the O2 Academy picked up on her. “It’s actually really nice because I love music and going to gigs so to be able to make work for bands I like is brilliant.” Sarah’s most recently done the artwork for , whose album came out at the end of February. “She knew want she wanted, and her music is really personal, so it was really nice to realise her ideas in my drawing.”

As the Irregular Folk posters are what led me to Sarah I wanted to know more about them. In these posters Sarah experimented with collage, “I quite like trying new ways of working and I don’t want to think that I only have one style or way of creating images”. She first made some collages for one of the Fusion Arts Pop Up Nights, a regular music night, which presents bands alongside an exhibition by local artists. The bands play for the night and the art then stays up for the rest of the month at Fusion Arts. “They’re really good events because you can put up anything. There’s no theme and so you’ll get a whole mix of art forms displayed alongside one another – it’s a good way to try new things out and see what the reaction is.” These nights do sound pretty perfect for Sarah, being a total combination of art and music, and it was on seeing Sarah’s collages exhibited at a Pop Up Night that music promoter Vez Hoper asked Sarah to design the Irregular Folk posters. Vez also hand paints tickets to Irregular Folk nights, which are really elaborate – sometimes even embellished with feathers! Both Vez and Sarah just pour so much effort and love into music and art and this dedication shines through the events and illustrations they produce.

Of course we sidetracked quite a bit chatting about Wood Festival, the secret Foals gig at the end of January, and how you can spend hours strolling around Truck Store and no one will bat an eyelid. Keep your eyes peeled for Sarah’s signature colourful jaunty illustrations, or have a browse of her portfolio on her website here. I’m certain I’ll keep spotting her work and it will keep making me smile.

From Oxford with love,

 

 

 

One day last year

One day last year, I was chatting on Twitter about burgers and, well, it kind of snowballed. One minute I was wondering where the best burger in Oxford was, the next minute everyone was screaming at me to try Atomic Burger‘s and and I was organising a full-on tweetup (a sociable gathering of people from twitter) there.

Two people attending the Tweetup , or now TweatUp given we always meet over food (follow #OxTweatUp on Twitter), were fellow Oxford-based bloggers Becca (@Ox_Bex) and Katy (@kalicer); we’d chatted on Twitter before but this was the first time we met. After an enormously fun evening of burger benchmarking and nattering about everything from cinema, to food, to Twitter, I had a little light bulb moment. With our combined knowledge of Oxford restaurants, and varied taste in food, we had the most amazing coverage of the Oxford food scene – we should create ‘the ultimate Oxford restaurant guide’! *DING*

Having been reviewing restaurants on my blog, FoodieOnTour for literally a couple of months at this point, it was early days, but I reached out to the girls and they were keen. Meeting up one afternoon at Ricks Café on Cowley Road, I elaborated on my master plan. All three of us agreed we wanted to provide engaging, honest, fair and unbiased insights into our dining experiences, which meant all meals to be paid for out of our own pockets, with the restaurants being unaware of the reviews taking place.

And so Bitten Oxford was formed.

Though it wasn’t quite that straightforward…

As three ladies with our own busy lives, it was almost impossible to get all of us together at the same time, at least for the first few months. Eventually, two of us sat down and decided on a launch date – we figured if we had a deadline to aim for, it would help us gather some momentum and direction. This was possibly one of the best things we did, as since then, we’ve been moving faster than Mo Farah in a marathon.

So how did we make it happen? Well, we got organised! Here are a few top tips based on what helped us work together as a team:

• Decide who’s doing what: allocate responsibilities fairly between you, so everyone has autonomy and knows what they need to do.

• Focus on strengths & embrace your differences: if one of you is more interested in design and another interested in the business management, then run with it – if you’re passionate about what you’re doing you’ll do it so much better. With any remaining tasks everyone just chips in where they can.

• Find a way to communicate: we’ve been meeting face to face pre-launch, but we expect to meet monthly once the site is up and running. For ad-hoc questions or ideas in between meetings we use email.

• Set up a to-do list with deadlines: this has been a huge help to us. We’re using a simple spreadsheet at this stage, but may progress to a more formal to-do program eventually, though the spreadsheet is working brilliantly and has been a fantastic tool to get us moving. Ensure you all have access and can edit.

• Create a shared drive to store important files: We have been using Google Drive, though Dropbox would also work well. We’re just about to set up a Photobucket account for storing shared images also.

• Be professional: Treat it like you would any business, for example have a good back up plan – we all get sick occasionally, so make sure at least one other member of the team knows how to cover for you if required. Consider your brand – is your image the same across social media, on business cards, on your website, etc?

• The boring stuff: do you need a partnership agreement? Do you need to do tax returns? Both items are worth considering and discussing. A partnership agreement might cover roles and responsibilities, business ownership, what happens if someone leaves, etc. We contacted an accountant and a solicitor to get advice, is it worth you doing the same?

• Make it fun: There no point in any of it if you don’t enjoy it – so don’t make it all about business. Eat some cake, have a couple of drinks, spend a bit of time socially and enjoy each other’s company!

As I write this, we are getting ready to launch the website, so a please stop by www.bittenoxford.co.uk to check it out for yourself. Here’s hoping you’ll be just as excited about it as we are!

Love and Bitten Oxford,

Jacqui

Jacqui Thorndyke is a guest blogger for Fe-line, when she isn’t writing FoodieOnTour, she is a full time Mum of two (MiniF1 & MiniF2), wife to MrF, and food addict. She loves cooking it, talking about it, and most importantly, eating it!