Hi I'm Leanda...
In spite of being filled with creative ideas, I always stall at the point that I am asked to write a little bit about myself. In short, I like to produce personalised pictures with anything from a digital name through to a carnival of symbolic places/things.
It’s hard to describe the background to all this, but a former colleague put it rather well the other day… “Leanda used to doodle on the telephone whilst speaking to major fashion and beauty clients at Vogue” (then kindly added, “and brought the big bucks in”, phew). I drew party invitations for friends at work and illustrated enormous leaving cards featuring favourite fashion shoots. I was there for 14 very happy years, which is a lot of doodling.
Prior to that I liked to draw in my friend’s rough books (school), on folders (uni) and spent an entire year of Young Enterprise creating a rather inappropriate ad campaign. St Mary’s Convent School before you ask. Finally, decades later, I finally had the head space to put pen to paper and start drawing the pictures
that people were asking for on a regular basis, stemming from the original daydreams of ‘Saz’s wedding to Keanu in Malibu’.
The Digital Stuff
This is a relatively recent discovery for me, having been terrified of tech for many years. I have to put out a special shout out to Romilla and Priya at the Honesty Café, who I approached to ask about who did their cool pictures. Priya said that it was her and would I like to come and see how she did them? I spent a wonderful few hours at Honesty HQ as soon as lockdown lifted and I went away completely inspired to get up and running with an iPad. A few months later a local family approached me to draw a plan of their new accommodation and a walking map of their beautiful farm – The Farm at Avebury. A must go – it’s impossible not to fall in love with the little self-contained stables, set in a former stable yard with a gorgeous courtyard filled with flowers, calming interiors, bobbin frames, pooky lamps and gorgeous pictures by Hannah Treliving, Georgie Weedon and Becky Borthwick. All local, completely dreamy and sprawling across a vast and sacred ancient landscape…how many getaway spots can boast their own Neolithic ceremonial site? Anyway, I did some sketches and quickly realised that I needed to be agile about making updates to the map (“the footpath sort of curves to the right over a stile next to a tree”). Alice was so patient whilst I worked out that the only viable way to do this was to lean on Google maps, an OS map and to do it digitally. I finally bit the bullet and replaced my 2011 first generation iPad (the grand-dame of tech) and off we went. The programme I use makes it super easy to move, change and alter bits. The perfect solution to the evolving map. I was assured that there would also be written directions which was something of a relief, since the ‘not true to size’ giant pig might be a bit tricky to navigate by, but there was no way we could leave his house out, right? The Name prints were born out of wanting to offer an affordable alternative to the hand-drawn pictures. Working digitally allows me to produce highly personalised work at an affordable price, starting with the text but still giving me the freedom to go all-out on the personalisation if anybody wants it. Owing to the nature of these illustrations they are much easier to print because they cut out the scanning process, although they are still colour matched by the hawk-eyed Adam and his Llama.
The Hand Drawn Stuff
Using WhatsApp to take delivery of what would equate to a truckload of photographs, I started to tailor family scenes filling in gaps using my imagination: a house, children doing characterful things, dogs misbehaving, horses being led plus loads of things that the subjects love: teddies, clothes (personalised head to toe including socks), a Land Rover, shoes, hockey sticks, tennis racquets, hobbies, bunting, dogs, cats, chickens and hamsters – oh, and a disco ball. The disco ball started out as a subconscious nod to Klute, the famously bad night club in Durham. A subtle reference to a past currently subdued by Tommy Tipee cups, school clubs and ‘could you pick some milk up on the way home’. The disco ball and bunting appear in most of my pictures now, a beacon of hope that there will always be dancing days! All of these pictures are personalised, right down to bunting even – one set featured the batik pattern taken from the Bridesmaids dresses at the couple’s Africa themed wedding, another was tie-dye from an activity one summer at a Grandparent’s house that resulted in all the Grandchildren having matching psychedelic t-shirts. The joy of these pictures for me, is that someone will recognise something that’s important to them. Often, they are deeply rooted – the couple who built their own eco lodge (a tiny thumbnail in the distance that you would struggle to see unless it was pointed out). A new house, with an open water swim team’s wetsuits on the washing line (again, a tiny detail in the distance). My favourites have been bittersweet. A tiny fairy ring drawing with the children playing in it and the toddler trying to catch a blue butterfly symbolising a magical much-missed Mother and Grandmother. Another picture from a son to his elderly mother, who had caught Covid and was confined to the ground floor of her house in a hospital bed – she hadn’t been able to feed the birds in her garden but the chickens were still able to come in to visit her. The conversation started these chickens and ended up with a swan, a tame turkey and a flock of wild budgerigars. Every single picture is packed with these symbolic references, they take a long time to draw and rely on a degree of mutual collaboration. They have all have been an honour to draw and I hope that the recipients enjoy them!