Get to Know Pickle Illustration- FAQs
Here’s a collection of introductions and quick-fire questions to give you an insight into Pickle Illustration behind the scenes!
The Name
A mash up of three reasons. Lauren’s old cat was called Pickle (RIP), we both LOVE pickles and also like the phrase ‘In a Pickle’- which comes from Shakespeare don’t you know…
Introducing Lauren
Born/Raised Leicester
Most Used Procreate Brush Nikko Rull
Favourite Project and Why I loved creating the illustrations for the Crafty Burger brand in Leicester. A restaurant close to home that does incredible food. It was so fun to create some playful burger related line illustrations.
Top Office Biscuit A classic chocolate shortbread rarely lets you down, apart from that anything with ginger in, the spicier the better!
Podcast of Choice Films to be Buried with is a classic for cinephiles, also special mention to Comfort Eating for all the cosy food chats.
Introducing Liv
Born/Raised Lichfield
Most Used Procreate Brush Inka
Favourite Project and Why Shirley boxes- Loved chatting to locals whilst painting, fab team to work with and seeing the impact it’s had. It’s still always a novelty going past them in the car, more than a year on. Being able to see something we’ve created out in the wild will forever feel special!
Top Office Biscuit Dark choc M&S extremely chocolatey round
Podcast of Choice Like Minded Friends
How we met
We met whilst studying Graphic Communication and Illustration at Loughborough University. Lauren slid into Livs dm’s looking for a friend and found one who had mutual interests in illustration and yoga!
Our super cringe ‘Pickle’ T-shirt we made…
Both on the Yoga Society Committee- our first joint design job!
How we work
No project is the same but being aware of each other's strengths and preferences influences how we tackle work. It always starts will a brainstorm with both pickles as this is where the creative thinking really starts, throwing around ideas, the weirder the better before we can start getting anything visual down.
Lauren’s strengths are composition, proportions and colour balance. She will often sketch out rough compositions, tackle any hands and limbs that need some attention and also is in charge of the blog, newsletter and most of Pickle’s written outputs.
Liv’s strengths are in textures and character so she will often take Lauren’s rough sketches and turn them into something that looks more final. She’s a dab hand at networking, is partial to a bit of boring admin (invoice creating hello!) and managing the online shop!
We both have an involvement in all projects we work on in some way and we like it like that! It’s all part of the bespoke pickle service. We’re never precious over our individual ideas so if one of us scraps another’s idea we don’t get offended, we both trust each other enough to believe there’s a reason for changing each others work. At the end of the day we only want the work (and Pickle) to get better so welcome criticism and adaptations with open arms!
What materials we use
For print and digital jobs Procreate is our main guy! We also use the Adobe Suite apps but LOVE how Procreate so effortlessly recreates drawing on paper. We still like to sketch manually but all of our final pieces mostly end up going through procreate.
How we celebrate wins
We have started a tradition of getting a cake commissioned for Pickle’s birthday every year which is an absolute JOY. We don’t have any traditions for little wins (apart from a big pat on the back to each other) but maybe we should…
How we see the future of Pickle…
Pickle has grown to have two heads; Print and Digital and Public Art and Murals and we would like to keep growing both! It would be great to hire some other pickle members in the future and to have an office space that we can all work from that isn’t Lauren’s flat attic! We would also like to do some travelling and work from different countries…