Characterful Scottish countryside gifts and kitchenware

for you and your home.

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Brown&Bridge began from a desire to recreate the warm and welcoming feel of a modern rustic country home. Artist and Designer Claire Brownbridge wanted to combine her passions for art, design and beautiful spaces into one creative outlet and began to play with creating colourful designs from her pencil drawings. In the process she discovered her ability to capture personality and character in her artwork, using colour and imagery to bring inside a sense of the outdoors and tell stories about the countryside.

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Each collection features a ‘Portrait’ and a ‘Field and Fold’ design. The Portraits provide a fun element, which plays with personality and storytelling, whilst the Field and Fold repeat patterns add a countryside flavour to homeware products, capturing a story in a classic country farmhouse design. Field and Fold designs can be accented by their corresponding Portrait or combined with coordinating prints, offering flexibility and options for creating your own cohesive visual story.

 

 

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The Design Process:

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The design process starts on foot with a camera around the Scottish countryside. I may take a photograph that inspires an idea or I may have an idea for a collection in mind, in which case I will look for subjects for my photos, aiming to capture their personality and characters. 

My Goose designs were the first I created. They originated from photographs taken on a walk, from which I produced a series of sketches that I felt really captured the quirky character of geese. I simplify my initial drawings to minimal lines that capture just the right amount of detail before scanning them to begin the design stage (I don’t use a drawing tablet to produce my sketches as I prefer the quality of line from a pencil or pen). It is here that I start to play with composition, colour and pattern, looking for shapes, balance and rhythm until I develop the final designs. Those I created for the Goose collection became the blueprint for future collections.

My style features flat areas of colour layered with line art. Colour is essential to each design and I look for inspiration from nature. Each design incorporates a unique signature colour within a core range of colours, which allows designs to coordinate with one another across collections. For example, the feature colour in my Goose collection is a deep rose which is a nod to the pink footed geese that fill my local fields every year.

 

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The Designs:

 

Each collection features a ‘Portrait’ and a ‘Field and Fold’ design. The Portraits provide a fun element where I can really play with personality and storytelling. The Fields and Folds are repeat patterns that add a countryside flavour to homeware products, capturing stories in classic country farmhouse designs.

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 Design Ethos:

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Independent brand, Slow Design, Made in Great Britain 

 

 I consider my work ‘Slow Design’, a little like the slow food movement! The focus is on quality and longevity and I take my time to create designs that I hope will be timeless and classic yet still have a contemporary edge. Each collection is carefully put together to produce a cohesive range with an absence of the trend led fashions that can lead to a fast turnover of consumable products. Our products are made in the UK and when choosing suppliers I consider their sustainability credentials and ethos. I like to work with companies who will enable me to test out smaller batches of designs with customers before I make a final design selection that can be produced in larger numbers. We aim to produce high quality, design led products and take pride in using British manufacturing to help us to achieve this.

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The beginnings - when and why did I begin creating my work?

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brown&bridge originated from a desire to recreate the warmth and welcoming feel of a modern rustic country home. I wanted to make everyday things beautiful, using colour and imagery to bring inside a sense of the outdoors and to tell stories about the countryside.

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I have always wanted to combine my Artistic and creative skills but had not quite worked out how. I loved drawing animals and enjoyed seeing the response people had to my work and I had a passion for design and interiors. It was after I produced a couple of illustrations for friends for their wedding stationery that I began to see a few possibilities and ideas began to form.

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I started Brown and Bridge in 2019, a few months before lockdown, which obviously presented a fair few challenges. For a while I found myself focusing on my main occupation of teaching, yet all the time I was creating the business in the background and finding my creative voice. Slowly things have come together. Dealing with changes from the pandemic alongside developing a new business and lifestyle has been equally difficult and exciting and I have found that it has taken a while for me to find my equilibrium. I am grateful, however, that this time has enabled me to learn new skills and think about the shape and format I want my work and business to take.

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My Inspiration:

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My work captures the feel of the countryside and lifestyle here in Perthshire, Scotland. My designs are based on Scottish wildlife and native breeds but my main focus is on their personalities and characters. I aim to capture these in my drawings so that I can produce designs that will make people smile, and hopefully create little moments of happy whenever someone uses or sees one of my products.

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What make my work unique?

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My designs are created from my own artwork, which I draw from my own source material. Throughout this process I focus on capturing character and personality so that I can bring it across in my work, to make it feel alive. I try to tell a story in each design by considering the subjects’ personalities, quirks and mannerisms – I even imagine the little conversations that might be going on!

 

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How do I see my pieces being used? 

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I want my designs to be uplifting by bringing character to interiors and the most mundane tasks, so I place my designs on products that will be used every day. As the kitchen is the heart of every home, this seemed a good location to start. I have included a range of cards too to enable you to send cheerful greetings to others!

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What’s next?

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I aim to add new collections by expanding my cast of characters from Scottish wildlife and native breeds and develop designs for new products. I want to place more emphasis on my initial sketches and studies too, in order to produce a range of beautiful artwork.

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