About the artist
Laura Clare is an artist and designer based in the South West of England, near Bath. She started creating art at a young age and now does so alongside her day-job as a children’s book designer. You can often find her drawing among the plants in her garden, or getting messy at the local screen-printing studio. She has previously been commissioned for a variety of products from honey jars to vending machines, but her favourite things to create are her bright and colourful handmade screen prints.
Inspiration
A lot of her personal work is inspired by anthropomorphic creatures (namely partying frogs!), English country gardens and the symmetry and detail of Victorian and Georgian architecture.
When she’s not creating or designing, Laura can often be found exploring the wild with her sausage dog, or obsessing over the frogs in her pond, and almost never without a cup of tea!
Process
With screen prints, her work always starts out as a basic sketch in the trusty notebook (often in her garden or in the grounds of some divine national trust house), before hand-drawing the design on either paper or an Ipad. Drawing on a digital platform allows Laura to keep the authenticity of a hand-drawn image, whilst also experimenting with different textures and colours in the final design. The artwork is then split out into the different layers of colour, before the messy part begins – printing!
Laura visits her local screenprinting studio in Marshfield every few weeks where she transfers all her artwork layers onto a screen, ready for printing. There is often a lot of trial and error when it comes to mixing the inks and printing, as both are done by hand, but it keeps the process interesting and ever-changing – as you never really know what the end result will be! The idea that each print is perfectly imperfect, and unique in some way is why this process is Laura’s favourite way for creating artwork. After the prints are dried, they are checked for quality and editioned (often out of 50), ready for their new home.