About us
Flaming Imp was started by Fiona Reeves back in 2010. I felt the need for a creative outlet, and I never seem to do things by halves! Here's the story of Flaming Imp's development.
With a degree in computer science from The University of Manchester my career has been as a software engineer and website developer, up until about 2018 when Flaming Imp become my main focus.
It all began with greeting cards. I had started doing a bit of sketching and painting in my spare time and I decided to get my own greeting cards printed, occasionaly selling them at parent/toddler groups I attended with my two children. I also created a few kids fun and educational posters. But I hadn't found my style yet. My designs at that time were made by taking close up photos of fabric and then using those photos in a collage effect to give colour and texture to my designs.
After the photo collage effect, I moved on to t-shirts featuring bold, simple designs that were mostly personalisable, like my Ship's Captain design (above).
In 2017 I discovered the kawaii cute style and fell in love with it. I started experimenting with drawing in this style and really enjoyed it. Over time, and a lot of practice, my own unique, recognisable style has emerged - the same style you see in the Flaming Imp logo, and it is the style I almost exclusively draw in now. Here's an example in my kawaii cute creamy latte coffee design:
My practice comes in the form of sketching with the Apple Pencil on an iPad using the Procreate app. I take part in many drawing challenge events on Instagram, which are great for inspiration as they usually work by providing prompts to get you thinking. Before making a sketch available for sale on a product I redraw it on my laptop to tidy it up. You can see some unused sketches and drawing challenge participations shared on my blog, and also on my Instagram, X/Twitter and Facebook social media accounts.
In the summer of 2019 Design By Humans did a feature on me - read the interview.