Steve Brown meets a very busy mum running an online illustrations business.
MANY of the artists featured in Reflections over the years have been well established in their fields and are working full time in their crafts. However, imagine being a mother with two very young children, continuing to be very successful in local paid employment, helping on your in-laws’ busy livestock farm and yet somehow also finding time to run an online illustrations business from the kitchen table.
Tideswell-based Hollie Spalton somehow finds time to do all this from her family home in the village but freely admits that she’s definitely looking forward to the completion of a studio in the back garden so that she can spend more quality time on her art. She hopes she can then do her artistic ambitions justice and expand her business without the inevitable distractions of young Archie and Evie!
Originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, Hollie moved to rural Leicestershire at the age of four to a village called Wymondham. Hollie moved on after A-levels to the study of Fashion Design at the University of Huddersfield. Her mum, Linda, has always been very artistic, being a potter and training people in this craft as well as doing her own paintings. Hollie’s love of art and drawing is carrying on this family trait; she also loved making things as a child. Her final collection on graduating from Huddersfield saw her making no less than seven outfits in achieving her first-class degree.
Hollie took her time after graduating to choose a job which suited her best, eventually working for a company designing and making slippers and soft footwear for several well-known retail outlets while living with her father back in Leicestershire. It was then that she met her future husband through online dating and after their marriage she moved up to Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire to be with him and to help on his family’s farm near Stoney Middleton.
Hollie then spent a period commuting from the Peak District into Manchester to work on design for a company making soft accessories. She now admits that she found the world of fashion to be one that people who only see its surface can rarely envisage, one of endless deadlines and pressure. So she took a life-changing decision to take a break from this type of work on being made redundant. She worked for a while in retail at the National Trust’s Lyme Park before going to work for Bagshaws, the well-known business based in Bakewell, where she has worked her way up to become Marketing and Design Manager.
Though Hollie’s love for art was present from a young age, it wasn’t until after her fashion career that she fully embraced drawing. Her style with a fine pen and ink includes incredible detail, down to individual hairs and lines, which is especially evident in her black and white pieces.
Her latest collection, ‘Furry Friends’, features coloured illustrations, which she starts with a colour wash before applying the fine details. Hollie creates her illustrations and artwork from photos (the only way to draw animals in natural poses as they don’t stay still for long!). She does an outline in pencil, highlighting hair movement, shadow and highlights and, most importantly, the position and size of the eyes! She has particularly enjoyed creating animal portraits and was fortunate in having many willing, or unwilling, subjects on the family farm. Cattle, sheep, horses, farm and family dogs all became the subject of her pen, starting with black and white but then introducing colours as she developed her techniques and her confidence.
Hollie’s portraits are characterised by her subjects’ quirky poses, catching the animals in natural positions rather than ones created for the camera and, as a result, she encourages her commission customers to take as many photos of their animals as possible so she can choose the most suitable ones for the portraits. Commissions for pet portraits are currently an important part of her work but she also has cards and pictures for sale based on several collections, each with an individual theme.
‘Farmyard’ and ‘Furry Friends’ contain pen portraits and pictures of animals/fowl in the first and of well-loved pets in the second; while Woodland depicts owls and other forest dwellers. Hollie would like to develop her collections further as part of her development as an artist, perhaps a Fruit and Veg portfolio, she muses? Also, she’s thinking about maps of the Peak District or smaller local areas or perhaps branching out into pictures of well-known local buildings such as Solomon’s Temple near Buxton; these would be interesting new departures for her. She would especially love to illustrate a children’s story book, so if there are any aspirant authors out there looking for an illustrator?
Hollie has sold her cards in the wool shop in Tideswell and tea rooms in Eyam but until recently her main source of exhibiting and selling her works was her own website at www.hsillustrations.co.uk To her obvious pleasure, however, it was her decision to get together with four other local artists and artisans in Tideswell and exhibit in the local institute for Derbyshire Open Arts in late May this year which made her realise that that she was perhaps better known in the art world than she thought; as she met so many people interested in her work there. Through this exhibition, she attracted more commissions for portraits and, hopefully, the Tideswell group will get together again in future to repeat this success.
As Hollie continues to balance family life and work, her artistic journey is just beginning. With her workshop on the horizon and wishing to expand her collections; there’s no doubt her unique style will soon reach a wider audience. We can only wish this hardworking lady well and hope that she enjoys artistic success in future!