Simon’s fiancée Ellie Williams is entering the BP Portrait Award 2010 and after careful contemplation of which face inspires her most, husband-to-be Simon was the perfect subject choice.

The Portrait Award is now in its thirty-first year at the National Portrait Gallery, is open to everyone aged 18 and over and is aimed at encouraging artists to focus upon and develop the theme of portraiture in their work.

Last year over 1,900 artists submitted their work and the exhibition, which featured sixty paintings, was seen by a record 298,000 people in London alone. Many artists who have had their work exhibited have gained commissions as a result of the considerable interest in the Portrait Award and the resulting exhibition and let’s hope that such successes follow for Ellie.

The portrait process

After settling on her subject, and with the competition’s submission deadline of 14^th February fast approaching, Ellie went ahead with the preparations. She commissioned Ben’s lovely Lucy to take some portraiture photography of Simon looking moody and thoughtful as a starting point.

You can see more of Lucy Hackett’s fabulous photography, featuring the original shots of Simon at: http://www.lucyhackett.co.uk.

Ellie, who showcases her artworks at the Artway Gallery and via various social media platforms such as Facebook has recorded each stage of the long process to perfection.

The stages show how Ellie started with a simple sketch and then gradually built up both detail and colour with the greatest care and precision. I think you’ll agree that’s Ellie has captured Simon beautifully, even if his multitude of freckles were giving her painter’s cramp

Stay tuned to find out about Ellie’s progress in the competition…

We worked with our friends at Ascender to create a no holds barred website.  Ascender came up with the eye catching Field & Fork logo, consisting of a fork with sprouting leaves, which has quickly become synonymous with high quality, fresh food that has been locally sourced. The logo also supports their tag line “Field & Fork, sourcing the best food every day.”

We used this as the basis to carry the web design forward, building the website from scratch and incorporating an easy to use CMS so that Field & Fork’s Janet could update menus and business news as needed. Jeremy also included the functionality for the banner on the homepage to be updated so that Field & Fork could promote seasonal offers, in line with their branding.

We also managed to show a bit more of our creative flair with this site as our copywriter, Kate, was able to get stuck in and write some meaty copy to promote the restaurant’s Roux trained owners. Kate also used her SEO powers to give Field & Fork a chance of sliding up the search engine rankings and within weeks we had knocked Field & Fork’s competitors for the “field and fork” Google top spot down a few pegs.

Our resident photographers got happy snapping the site’s images at the Pallant House Gallery’s Restaurant opening party. There was picturesque food aplenty and it tasted just as good as it looked. Ben and Lucy did chef Sam’s beautiful culinary creations justice, I’m sure you’ll agree.

This was a particularly exciting project for us and whenever we lacked vision or energy we could just take a glimpse out of our office window at the waiting staff serving delicious lunches and cakes in the Gallery’s courtyard garden. Yep, that’s right Field & Fork is just opposite the Chichester Design office so if after reading this and you decide to check out the goods for yourself (and how can you resist?) think of us and give us a little wave.