Made in Britain
Transferring her carefully studied drawings into skilfully carved linocuts, designer Anneliese Appleby produces beautiful handprinted wallpapers
We visit handprinted wallpaper designer Anneliese Appleby
The scene of Anneliese Appleby’s ‘open-air studio’ on a fresh summer’s morning could not be more idyllic. The cottage garden, nestled in the bucolic countryside near Malvern in Worcestershire, is brimming with self-seeding aquilegia, fragrant roses and scented sweet peas, with clematis and honeysuckle scrambling up walls and over fences. As she sits, sketchbook in hand, studying the granny’s bonnets in pink and purple hues glorified in the soft light, which nod in the gentle breeze, humming bees settle on lavender bushes nearby, birds chatter to
her from the trees… Is it any wonder that with such inspiration all around, flora and fauna inspire many of her designs for handprinted wallpapers?
Anneliese’s pencil drawings, brought to life with a wash of watercolour, capture all of the delicate beauty of nature, and form the basis for her linocut wallpaper designs. As ideas for patterns tumble from her head, she’ll gather up her artist’s easel and venture out to find her ‘muses’ – from lupins and vines, to orchard trees and strawberry fields. ‘For what I do, I need to draw from life; you can’t get all of the details and movement from photographs,’ she explains. This may find her perched up an apple-picker’s ladder in the depths of an orchard for hours; joining harvesting time at a vineyard; strolling around woodlands collecting leaves, acorns and branches; or venturing out at dawn to study the minute detail of flowers growing in the garden. With careful refinement, and at times a stroke of serendipity, from these preliminary drawings she will develop the repeat patterns that skilfully mimic natural growth scrambling up or across walls, and the artist’s pencil will be swapped for the cutter’s tool to meticulously carve the image into lino block.
‘I learn from each design and progress it a little; they all feed into each other,’ Anneliese explains. While the natural world and flora and fauna are reflected in many of her wallpapers, she also gathers ideas from scouring museums and historic properties. Her latest design was inspired by a 17th-century wallpaper fabric she discovered in the V&A’S print room, and another from the Victorian floor tiles at Malvern Priory.
It’s with a touch of irony that having initially followed a route of graphic design, she has returned full circle to her childhood roots of finding pleasure from drawing flowers and plants. ‘I found a drawing I made when I was about 18 of a bramble branch, which I stuck in a sketch book and never thought of as being anything significant, but I have come right back to that.
‘I was brought up in a creative and carefree household, and we were quite free roaming as children, exploring the countryside,’ she adds. ‘Like my mother, I loved flower pressing, and was always making and creating.’
In the early 1990s, Anneliese studied a graphic design course at Coventry University but soon found it too masculine for her more feminine artistic sensibilities. ‘It was all very computerised and was the early days of Photoshop so quite limited and basic in comparison to the sophistication of what can be achieved today.’ Her liking for hand-rendered graphics – now very much in vogue – was also ahead of its time, and her organic designs did not always curry favour.
Having worked at a graphic design studio for a couple of years and then in retail in home furnishings, ‘where I suppose all that time looking at fabrics and wallpapers I was subliminally
gathering an understanding of how patterns work,’ Anneliese gained a teaching qualification and taught print making at Malvern College. ‘I spent ten years learning so much; it was amazing,’ she says. In 2013, a QEST Scholarship enabled her to work at the historic Tilley Letterpress Printing in Ledbury, Herefordshire, and learn the principles of this traditional printing method, where her pen and ink drawings were transferred to metal plates and produced as letterpress prints.
‘The idea of creating my own handprinted linocut wallpapers had been niggling away at me for years, so in about 2014 I started designing and playing around with ideas,’ says Anneliese. Having found a 1950s press on Ebay, which arrived in bits, she enlisted the help of an engineer neighbour to modify it on a minimum budget so that she could feed paper through it, and after three months of a little sweat and toil, got it working.
The vintage press takes pride of place in the centre of her studio housed in a converted ancient chicken shed. This tranquil space is flooded with light through French doors, which she sometimes throws open to the warm sunshine and is joined by sheep, who wander in from the neighbouring field.
Making papers to order, she mixes colours by eye, ‘which at times can be instinctive, and others can take a long time to get right. It’s always interesting to see the different colours people choose and the effect it has on the design. A future plan is to create more than one lino plate to introduce other colours into a pattern,’ she says.
‘I have many different ideas to explore and avenues I could go down, such as prints combining linocut and etching, and developing designs into more homeware,’ explains Anneliese, who currently produces a limited run of hand-sewn printed linen cushions, and teatowels. ‘People are not always at a point where they are ready to decorate, so I’ll always have other little projects running alongside,’ she adds. ‘But nothing quite beats seeing my wallpapers hung in situ in someone’s home. I still find that exciting.’
To see more of Anneliese’s designs and products visit annelieseappleby.co.uk or call 07968 825830