The Making of our Two Temple Place Commission

This is a look behind the process of creating the drawings and designs for our collection of products we have design for Two Temple Place, based on the extraordinary interior and exterior details and architecture of the building.

We designed two tea towels and a colouring and searching book that explore the fantastical decor, vivid history and stunning interiors of this hidden gem on London's Embankment.

The book brings together a selection of lovingly illustrated characters, creatures and stories, for you to search for within the building, and to draw and colour at home.

One tea towel is an A-Z, which works like an eye spy game, and the other is a game, similar to our other game based tea towels, where you can cut out the counters on the packaging and play the race game where you meet some of the fascinating characters and objects that adorn the building along the way!

As part of this process, we had our very own private tour of the space, and even studio assistant Dante was able to come along. We have visited this pace many times before, but been able to look around, with Rebecca and Gabriella was amazing and we were able to see and think about many things we have never noticed before.

Each of these objects brings together many hours of drawing to document and represent a carving, image or detail using a variety of processes, mainly within illustrator and photoshop. Each drawing starts as a vector outline made in illustrator. These line drawings are important to capture the key details and structure of the object or character. Some of these outlines work well as complete drawings, some don’t really make sense without any additional shading or texture. But in the colouring book, many of these drawings were presented as these simple line drawings so people could then colour or shade their own interpretation of the object either while in the space, or later at home.

Once these line drawings are perfected, we then use a process in photoshop which replicates hand drawing and shading. We used to make these kind of drawings by hand using chinagraph pencils and with crayons, like the original drawings for these products. But this was too unpredictable and slow to make the number of drawings we needed to make for both our Tate Commission and this work for Two Temple Place. So, now we are using a very specific photoshop brush and a pencil to create the range of marks and lines needed to highlight the differences in material and texture from the weathered rough stone of the outside carvings, the polished fine wood carvings of the inside of the staircases and great hall.

During this process we also researched some of the characters that we weren’t familiar with, or revisited stories we already knew. Some of our favourite specific objects, drawings and stories include Jessica from The Merchant of Venice, Athos from the Three Musketeers, the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isoude, Uncas the Last of the Mohicans, a Cherub on a telephone, and the ship weather Vaine.

We then experimented with various ways of bringing the drawing together that would make sense of the space, and the valet of objects, characters and stories within the building. We settled on mainly using a simple ‘geographical’ system of grouping objects that are in the same space together, but not in the strict the order of locations that they are. The main spaces we used were:

The Outside of the Building

The Stair Case and Upper Gallery

The Library

The Great Hall

Within the book, these spaces all became one double page spread. This also led to the book title of ‘Two Temple Place Miscellany’ considering the drawings as a group or collection of different items, or a ‘mixture’.

Within the game tea Towel, these spaces became the basis of a simple ‘race game’ where contestants move backwards and forwards using a ‘spinner’ and ‘pieces’ which can be cut out of the packaging, and responding to prompts which are developed from research about the specific characters and stories with the spaces.

The A-Z Tea towel was developed thinking about a game of ‘I Spy …….’ and the huge range of characters, objects and stories which can be conjured or arrived at, through the Two Temple Place exterior and interior.