Art and About: Charlotte Trounce reflects on her epic journey across the UK’s museums and galleries

For the past few weeks, illustrator Charlotte Trounce has been roaming the UK’s plethora of museums and galleries to time travel between the huge amount of art and objects on show, as well as the contrasting architecture that houses them. Charlotte created a series of illustrations in response to what she saw and the work has been commissioned by It’s Nice That in partnership with the Art Fund, to celebrate the National Art Pass. The Pass provides free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic houses across the UK, as well as 50% off entry to major exhibitions. With such a mammoth task now completed, here Charlotte reflects on the project alongside a behind the scenes peek of the illustrator at work on location and in her studio.

All three briefs have given Charlotte time to wander around the numerous galleries and museums she travelled to, which included: Tate Modern, the National Gallery, Jewish Museum London, Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Charleston, the Sussex home of the Bloomsbury Group and the Barbican Art Gallery as well as many more. This freedom is something the illustrator relished: “It’s so easy to spend too much time in the studio on the computer as you can generally find any imagery you need on the internet, but this project has really shown me how important it is to get out and draw to find inspiration, and I think it shows in the work I’ve produced,” she explains.

For the project, the National Art Pass provided opportunities to travel outside of London to places that the illustrator hadn’t been to before. “It’s been the best part of the project, I’ve visited some different spaces that I maybe wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the project, like the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.”

The energy and texture communicated in Charlotte’s illustrations alludes to the way she worked throughout the project and is indicative of her style as a whole. “I don’t enjoy sitting in front of a screen all day and I also think that when I try to create my work too digitally I lose some of the nice qualities that come from hand drawing. For this project I worked almost entirely by hand and I think that worked perfectly for the brief.”

Charlotte purposely left her drawings “loose and sketchy,” which in turn has created a “visual record” of her visits rather than a set of polished and less personal illustrations. To achieve Charlotte’s expressive strokes, the illustrator used her Muji brush pens when out on visits. “I wanted the drawings to be as consistent as possible,” she says. “For the final works of art I wanted to add some colour but still keep the same sketchy feel, so I used watered down acrylics to apply washes of colour.”

A lot of of the final illustrations were directly informed by the work Charlotte had created in her sketchbooks, which were a key part of her process during the project. “Many of the images were the scans of the original drawings made on location,” she explains. “When I draw from life rather than from photos, there is a nice quality to the line work that comes from drawing at a faster pace, they have more character.”

When she wasn’t working on location surrounded by the voluminous ceilings and historic objects at the galleries and museums, Charlotte worked in her studio in South Bermondsey. “It works well for me because there is almost nothing going on around there to distract me,” she says. “I have a big desk near a window and I use the wall in front of me to hang drawings and other images I like.”

While the project is now done, Charlotte says she plans to makes sure she steps away from her computer screen more often. “I’m very inspired to continue visiting museums and galleries to draw and collect ideas when I’m working on projects, so I’ll definitely be using my National Art Pass a lot more.”

A National Art Pass offers 50% off major exhibitions, plus free entry to hundreds of museums, galleries and historic places across the UK. The really good bit? Funds raised through the pass allow the Art Fund to help museums and galleries buy important works of art for everyone to enjoy. Learn more about the National Art Pass here and use the offer code ITSNICETHAT to receive a free limited edition print by Charlotte Trounce with your purchase of the National Art Pass.