Paul Wearing

Paul Wearing lives in London and is a graduate of the RCA. Starting as a Textile Designer, he discovered his love of Graphic Art through album covers and he went on to work for companies like Liberty and Conran Design creating wallpapers for their ranges.

He recalls doing lots of paper collage in the early days and marvelling over the work on The Face and id Magazine in the eighties, “but now” (he says) “much of my day is spent on the computer”

Through attending trade fairs like Premier Vision, he developed a love for colour predction and colour trending, this obviously fed into his work and he has now been an illustator for the last 20-25 years.

Chatting to Paul, he recalls creating a wonderful painting of a Fish at the age of 8 and being inspired by the imagery in childhood films like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Paul found a love in designer’s work like Clarles and Ray Eames, Lucienne and Robin Day and painters like Edward Bawden, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious.

I asked Paul what his main likes and disilikes were to do with his working life. He replied that he dislikes the part of work that involves conference calls and lengthy contracts and getting stuck on one style of illustration that people expect to see in his work. But likes it when he gets to work with Art Directors who understand his ideas and having the time (like over the last year) to continue to develop his own personal work.

Personally I love the curvy, mid-century feel to his work, combined with a use of overlapping and see through colour and textures inspired by his early textile design background. He created these panels with his brother Nigel using stitch on a vintage finish leather.

Another project from 2010 includes illustrations for Kitchen Secrets by Raymond Blanc.

Each chapter focuses on a different group of ingredients. Here are the opening pages to the Summer berries, Spring greens and the Fish chapters.

Colour plays such an important part in my work. We decided early on to give each chapter opening it’s own colour theme, reflecting ingredients and recipes.

Many thanks to Paul for the phone call the other week, I think we have quite a lot in common with our textile pasts and design backgrounds. Keep up the amazing work and delighting your followers with your stylish precision, and fab use of colour and shape.