Alison Carmichael
Alison Carmichael is a London based artist who specialises in hand lettering. Carmichael mainly works with advertising agencies, design groups and branding consultants but has also done exhibition signage, window displays, pop promos, embroidered lettering, body painting, writing with ketchup, sugar sprinkles, whipped cream, treacle, loose tea leaves and even full-scale crop circles. She is known for her vast range of diversity and flexibility in lettering styles.
But Carmichael doesn’t make all her work without a little help to make the process easier, for example like the ketchup on the cover of time out for the “cheap eats” issue, it appeared that the lettering was about the same size as an average dinner plate. But Carmichael reviled it was, in fact much bigger than that and was resized digitally. Carmichael first created the artwork in pencil on paper and then enlarged it and printed it out at the size she wanted to create it. Then used graphite rubdown paper to create a feint outline of the lettering on the surface that it was being photographed on and then Carmichael carefully filled and built up the shapes of the letters using the wrong end of a teaspoon.
I really like Alison Carmichael’s work, for the fact that she creates these magnificent pieces of typographic words with a variety of different media not just the typical Photoshop typography but making the words by hand which must take hours to do but with the skills that Carmichael has honed it no problem.
Researching into Carmichael has made me think I should try using unconventional media before using the obvious media when experimenting.
