It's my birthday next week, and with that, I'll be celebrating 9(!) years of OneCuriousChip! So here's a little advert I designed for myself and what I do: graphic design and illustration, or dearadh grafach agus léaráid, as Gaeilge. Click through to see the design process behind this one. :)

Sometimes I draw tiny things. This was one of them. Another illustrated element fro my Study in Scarlet project!

The Victoria Hotel was Cork’s oldest functioning hotel until its closure in 2014. Built in 1810, it had been patroned by the likes of Michael Collins, survived the burning of Cork in 1920, and hosted the second ever meeting of the GAA. After the hotel closed its doors, the building was repurposed for retail and if you’re familiar with Cork City nowadays, you might recognise it as a Monsoon/Accessorize on Patrick’s St, just opposite Opera Lane. In the past week or so though, construction has begun on referbishing the building; which apparently involves exposing the old hotel ballrooms and spaces, and it looks like its going to be pretty sympathetic to the original design, with a modern twist. I love these little histories, so I’m happy to see them celebrated again! :)

Anyway, when I found myself needing to draw a fictitious hotel set the early 1900s for my Study in Scarlet project, the Victoria hotel is what came to mind and that’s what I based my fake advert on. I even borrowed the Victoria Hotel’s original phone number! To reflect the story though, it became Halliday’s Private Hotel of Little George Street, London. :)

One of the most interesting - and most time-consuming! - parts of my Study in Scarlet project was the typography in all the adverts. Everything is based very heavily on historical advertising references from the early 1900s (I had a lot of fun with that research!) and I ended up drawing pretty much every letter by hand. There are so many delightful quirks in that vintage lettering, and I really wanted to capture as many of those characterful details as possible! Click through to take a look!

I didn’t know much about the SS Sirius until recently, despite seeing its legacy all over Cork. If you visit Cobh today, you might pass the Sirius Arts Centre; if you wander around Passage West you might see a paddle shaft from the ship on display; it's even the reason Ballycotton has a lighthouse now!

I'll share its story below if you're curious, but the reason I researched and drew it in the first place was as part of an advert in my Scarlet project. I've used artistic license obviously, but it's a self-indulgent project anyway, so I drew my favourite instead of a more accurate ship 🤷 It felt like a good time to share the story too, as Sirius made its most famous journey in April. I’ve also been playing AC Black Flag lately, humming sea shanties while sailing around in my virtual ship. So, here's the (shortened!) story of a historic Cork ship!

One of the main reasons I’ve been so fascinated with the Illustrated Police News lately is because of the old-school illustrations in them. I like the idea that entire front covers of newspapers around the turn of the 20th century may have been filled, essentially, with comics telling the latest news and gossip stories. Some of them are fascinating little slices of life: in my research, I’ve seen illustrations of stilt-walkers racing the trams in Dublin, and hot air balloons going rogue, and police tracking convicts who’ve escaped by hiding in coffins. I’d be unlikely to have noticed any of those stories if they hadn’t had curious little illustrations alongside them!

With that in mind, for the front cover of my Study in Scarlet project I decided to fill the page with a sort of comic summary of Part I of story itself. From the initial discovery of a dead body at Lauriston Gardens, to Sherlock Holmes’ clever capture; it’s all based very heavily on illustrations and layouts and typography I found in actual issues of the Illustrated Police News, and also some very early artwork of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Lots and lots of crosshatching later, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

One of the first elements I drew for my Study in Scarlet Project was 221B Baker Street. From what I can tell, Baker Street would have been a high-class residential area when the stories were written, and the apartment that Holmes and Watson share would probably have been part of a Georgian Terrace house. Although the street itself did exist when A Study in Scarlet was written, the numbers didn’t go up as high as 221 until the street was extended in the 1930s. The residents of the new building almost immediately began recieving both fan mail and genuine letters of inquiry from people hoping to avail of the consulting detective’s services, at a volume that apparently warrented hiring a full time staff member to deal with. XD

In 1990, the Sherlock Holmes Museum opened its doors at numbers 237 - 241 Baker Street, yet claimed the address of 221B. When the leader of the Westminster City Council officially bestowed the famous address upon the museum, a dispute quickly broke out between the museum and the residents of the actual No. 221. It seems the feud wasn’t settled until 2005, when the residents of the real No. 221 left their premises, and the museum was given sole rights to the famous address. To this day, Baker Steet is the only street in London that has a house number out-of-sequence with the rest of the street.; a fun little literary quirk popping up in urban architecture. :)

All this is to say: I based my illustration largely, but not entirely, on 221B as it stands today. It didn’t exist when the story was written, so I felt free to use artist license. Nevertheless, I had fun learning about the history of the address. :)

A while back, I started listening to Sherlock Holmes stories while I worked. One idea led to another, and soon enough, I found myself researching early 1900s typography, advertising and newspapers, so that I could redesign the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," as an issue of The Illustrated Police News, full of illustrations and advertisements that support the story. For many reasons, this is perhaps the most self-indulgent personal project I've taken on lately, and one of my favourite portfolio pieces to date. ️️

I plan to talk about some of the individual elements later on - this project gave me an excuse to draw steam ships and violins and portraits and hats! - but for now I just want to share the project as a whole. A fun little adventure through history and storytelling via graphic design. ️

I read Terry Pratchett's Going Postal recently, and not surprisingly, it got me thinking about post. I like his idea of letters being like "little packets of history" and the fact that you can seal a letter with a "loving kiss" or whathaveyou. I've been lucky enough to read old postcards my relatives wrote decades ago - about their travels and their work and their romances! - and it makes me think that perhaps we lost something when we moved to emails and DMs.