The Christmas present struggle. We have all been there. Especially me.

I would sit at a piece of paper trying to come up with present ideas for my family and friends, but always came up with a blank.

Last year, I resorted to just browsing the Black Friday sales in hope of inspiration. But the year prior, I was definitely struggling, until I went to the Summerhall Christmas Fair.

This fair had many craftspeople there as well as food stalls and carollers. Anyway, at one of these stalls was a lady who did these books that assembled into a cube. Her work mainly displayed her beautiful silhouettes of the city or magical fairy wonderlands.

I was really interested in this book form so I experimented and decided to made a 3D cube guide book of Edinburgh for my parents. They were due to visit me in the months after Christmas, so I thought it would be nice for us to have set places to visit.

The locations I choose were:

– Edinburgh Castle

– Edinburgh Botanical Gardens

– Usher Hall

– Newhaven Lighthouse

I decided to do these drawings with a black fine liner pen and a block colour background of gouache paints. I quite liked the style of these drawings and something a little different to large textural drawings. I also added little tags of the places and the address, so it turned out to be a lovely little guide book in the end.

I constructed all of these drawings into a cube format, with a fabric front and back cover.

I loved how it turned out, considering I didn’t really do a proper sample. However, this is something I definitely will experiment with in the future!

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