Express yourself: Unlocking a new side to your creative persona

Here at It’s Nice That, we tend to fall in love with an artist for their distinct visual style. Often this style has taken many years to develop and will probably be an ongoing learning curve for as long as the practice continues – the journey is part of the fun, right?

But no matter how strong and sturdy the aesthetic, there is one vital constant that is an inherent part of the creative process: experimentation. For many creatives, one of the simplest and most effective ways to stimulate new ideas is to try out a new medium. By grabbing hold of that new pen you’ve always to try, or by finally learning that new programme which will take your practice to another level, new mediums can give rise to an undiscovered aspect of your creative inner self.

This is the topic we’re here to explore today with two esteemed UK illustrators, Charlotte Mei and Olivia Twist. We’ve gifted these two artists with an innovative art tool each, inviting new found inspiration into their established practice while encouraging you at home to do the same. Find out more here. Both have a certifiably unique style which feels undisputedly their own but in this article, we’re exploring other, unexpected avenues of their practice which never fail to spur on more ideas. The London-based illustrator and artist Charlotte is best known for her endlessly charming paintings featuring pastel colours and a light, tactile touch. Imbued with a hint of warm nostalgia, her clients include Nike, Sony Music, Hermès, Penguin Books, not to mention a recent collaboration with Lulu Guinness.

While she is widely known for her 2D works, Charlotte in fact operates across a myriad of disciplines which keeps her on her toes creatively. She works in clay, animation, collage, comics (not to mention drawing and painting) and it is this eagerness to consistently feed her creative appetite which sustains a momentum and makes her work infinitely alluring to the viewer. “It’s definitely true that some of the best ideas, visual or otherwise, come from mistakes, so working in a way which allows for mistakes prevents me from stagnating within my practice,” she tells us on the importance of shaking things up.

Although she has a masterful touch when it comes to using these pens, Olivia is far from complacent. “It’s fun to challenge yourself to keep growing as a designer,” she asserts. For instance, a while ago, she established an aesthetic which features the colour black on different black backgrounds. But that doesn’t mean the black has to appear in just one definitive way. “I’m happy to work in black conte crayons, biros, even paint markers because I love the different textures they form,” she tells us. “I think it’s easy to get comfortable, and this illustration thing is for life, so I have to shake it up for myself you know.”

It’s an attitude Olivia shares with Charlotte, who expresses the diversity of thought and emotion through a variety of mediums. Charlotte says: “It wouldn’t feel right to me to limit my practice to a specific process.” Whatever the medium she chooses to communicate in, there is one unifying element which ties all her work together: ideas. It’s Charlotte’s experiences as a person, rather than control over a material, which matter most to her. “In that sense,” she maintains, “experimenting with new media is a really important part of my creative development and often leads my work to new discoveries as process guides my evolving practice.”

The established illustrator also learns something new with each iteration of an artwork. “Something that comes in the form of screwing up,” Charlotte says on the beauty of imperfection, “and realising that the screwed up version is way cooler.” Her practice started out however with a particular focus on colour. One of her earlier memories is her painting a bunch of flowers when she was four years old. Even today, she can vividly recall the purples, reds and greens in the still life. Ever since, colour has been integral to Charlotte’s work, playing a key role in the evocation of feeling. The immediacy of putting colourful paint to canvas is what first attracted her to painting – a crucial aspect of Charlotte’s work – but with time, she’s applied her knowledge of colour to other experiments, most recently exploring the depths of digital media and moving image.

By openly exposing herself to a variety of mediums, Charlotte receives the benefits of the tactility of analogue mediums, as well as the immersiveness of the digital. Both the analogue and digital play important aspects in her practice, not to mention in the broader world, in different ways. “You can really accelerate ideas in the digital,” she explains, “but in the analogue, a tactile and bodily mode of creating exists which is sub-cognitive and instinctive. I guess I couldn’t give up either one.”

For Olivia on the other hand, trying out new techniques allowed her to work slower and in turn, “think deeper about the critical underpinnings of my work.” By removing the comfort blanket of the pen, she can preempt composition and the line work, allowing her ideation process to become more considered and reflective. It’s a tried and tested process for the illustrator, who previously took part in an artist residency in Johannesburg taking on the challenge of working with paint, indulging in the making process and letting her work breathe with time. There, she learned more about layering and transparency and essentially, how to make her work pop. Then, a while later, during another residency at a youth club in South London, she ventured into a project with spray paints, customising donated bikes with young locals. This, on the other hand, taught her a completely different skill: the importance of planning.

As for the future, Olivia is itching to try out digital embroidery in this way, hoping to experiment with it on some fabrics she’s dyed herself. There’s no doubt this will teach her something else completely new, making room for more happy accidents which only enriches the work both conceptually and technically. Charlotte and Olivia’s work is testament to this experimental spirit, an ethos additionally embraced by Bombay Sapphire and the 12 Days of Creativity campaign, jam-packed with a host of creative content to release undiscovered creative potential.