Squeezing me into a small gap in her busy schedule, Arran Stamper invited me to her flat in Edinburgh to talk about her current project. Dressed in a snazzy jumpsuit of her own making, she ushers me into her workspace-come-bedroom, which exudes the feel of a curiosity shop all mixed up with a well-organised design studio. In the centre of the room is a very large, very beautiful antique desk, the top of which has been rebuilt from oak floorboards and is strewn with plans, notes, sketches, pens and coffee mugs. She motions for me to take a seat on her deep, cushy sofa and immediately begins to pour two large glasses of white wine…

I see you’ve got a lot of work going on at your desk space. Is this where most of the creativity goes on?

Sort of, yeah. Although I usually do most of my initial research for a project in the library. I spend a lot of time checking out way more library books than I can carry, and they tend to be in areas that reach outside of what the project is really about. So for example, maybe books about biology, or more recently space, or the evolution of life. I draw from a lot of those concepts and transfer them into my work. I like to bring in something else other than just my ideas, so that there’s a little more of a factual base.

So once you’re satisfied that you have enough of that kind of research, is that when you come back here to your desk and begin designing?

Yeah I mean I spend a lot of time at this desk making work, but I also have the Illustration studio at ECA, and I really enjoy being a part of that community. I’m definitely the one to lean over and ask like ‘what do you think of this colour?’ or ‘do you like this line?’ Sometimes I just need someone else’s opinion, and it can be the tiniest thing but for me it just reaffirms the path that I’m on.

I tend to spend the normal working hours through the week in the studio, but on evenings and weekends I’ll be in here at the desk working as well, and that’s nice because I’ve got my flatmates here, who are really good at helping me out with all my questions too.

Is there anything you have to have by your side whilst working, like maybe a constantly topped up cup of coffee-

Yes!

Or maybe a certain type of music you listen to?

Music not so much, I can have anything on really, but I definitely have a strict coffee routine. I have one of those coffee things, you know, that goes on the hob. I love the routine that comes with preparing and making that; I need to plan time to do it and really enjoy my morning coffee, and then I can get on with it. It really punctuates the day. I can just go off and start the whole process again whenever I feel like I need another one. Whereas that’s something I can’t really do at the studio.

Yeah, home comforts can be a real help with the process sometimes.

Definitely! I also have a bookcase over there [she points over my shoulder] which is full of things I’ve collected or people have given to me. Lots of them are fashion books or calligraphy books or like, i-d and Wallpaper magazines. I just obsessively have loads of them, and I find them really sort of comforting. I don’t really reference any of them that much but it’s just nice to have those sort of design-y ideas and inspiration around.

So in terms of your own design style, do you tend to stick to your personal flare or do you like to take on different drawing styles?

Over the past year I’ve started to feel like it really just depends on the brief. I really enjoy solving problems, and I see the brief as a problem and illustration as the solution. So if a certain style of illustration solves the problem better than another, then yeah I’ll change it. But in general the way I draw changes a lot based on how I feel or what I want to draw. I don’t really stick to one style, though a lot of people tell me I have a very distinctive one. I see myself as having lots of different categories of styles, and I’m aiming to bring all of those together to make one illustration ‘identity’.

Do you feel that you’ve always had an illustration ‘identity’, or was illustrating something that came to you later on?

Well I’ve always drawn. Like always. I’ve always, always drawn.
My mum is a sculptor and interior designer, so I’ve grown up with artistic influences around me. I was never forced into it in any way, I always just preferred art at school. And in sixth form I wanted to be a fine artist, because I thought fine art was the be all and end all. Then I had one of those mock interviews, and one of the interviewers looked at my portfolio and said ‘well why aren’t you applying for illustration?’ I literally had not heard of illustration as a subject. I didn’t know it was even taught anywhere. It was just one of those things; I had a few spaces left on my UCAS form, I applied for a few illustration courses, and it’s turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made. It’s just the perfect blend of that kind of problem solving and the sketchy, fine arty thing too.

So now you’re in your fourth year of Illustration and working on your big, final project. Is it a natural progression from your work in the past, or is it something new that you’re allowing yourself to experiment with?

This is actually the first time where I feel like I know exactly what I want to do. I don’t know how long that will last, because I change my mind a lot. But I came into fourth year off the back of an exhibition at the end of last year where I designed a load of aliens, and I felt that those illustrations came more from me, rather than drawing on outside research. What I came up with in the end really felt like my own little creatures, so I want to see how far I can take that.

And because they’re characters, they have their own little worlds and I want to create that for them. I want to show it in an almost scientific way. Like an encyclopaedia. I want to be able to give information about their dietary requirements, houses, relationships, the way they walk and talk, and how they interact with each other, things like that. So yeah, I’m just really focussing on character development and all that comes with that really.

When you’re creating those characters, obviously there’ll be a lot of them that you fall in love with and really care about, but are there any that you create and then think ‘God I hate this character, I hope it never sees the light of day?’

[She laughs] I don’t know, I mean, I suppose I must do. I must do but I don’t think about them. Because I have loads of them, I mean there’s whole sketchbooks full of little things with faces, which as far as I’m concerned are characters. But I never feel that negatively about them, I just enjoy the process of creating them and being like ‘Oh hey, how are you?’ Not every character is something that’s going to go further for me, I just start and see what happens. Like the ‘Snailien’, he just started as a little doodle and in the end it became this huge exhibition piece.

Speaking of going further – are there any artists, designers, or just creative people in general that you’d like to (perhaps in an ideal world) work with?

Well I have two absolute favourites, and those are Ralph Steadman and Alexander McQueen, even though McQueen isn’t an illustrator. But I think in terms of working with someone, I really like to collaborate with people who don’t do what I do, so I think in that respect it’d have to be McQueen. I’d love to work with the brand, or even him – even though sadly that isn’t really possible anymore – because I really admire his contribution to design and art and fashion. Yep, that’s it, that’d be the dream.