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The Gallery holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Search over 215,000 works, 150,000 of which are illustrated from the 16th Century to the present day.

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Behind the Scenes of the BP Portrait Award Family Trail

I am Jenni Desmond and I create picture books. My first book was Red Cat Blue Cat which won the Cambridgeshire Read it Again Award 2013. My new book is The Zebra Who Ran Too Fast (Walker Books). This summer I was the illustrator for the BP Portrait Award Family Trail, and here I am going to tell you how I created it. Things started when I cycled from my studio in Hackney to a meeting inside the National Portrait Gallery. We discussed the characters in the trail and what they should look like, and how the trail should be laid out. …

By Jenni Desmond, Illustrator BP Portrait Award Family Trail, 2014

24 July 2014

Making a Design for Virginia Woolf

There were a number of influences at work in designing Virginia Woolf; Art, Life and Vision. When I started the process I thought about Woolf living out her life in a series of intimate rooms. I looked at how these spaces could be overlaid on the gallery itself and I made a complex diagram of how this plan could work. As the design developed I applied the same ideas to the walls as a series of coloured frames and panels as if viewers were looking through one room to another. …

By Calum Storrie, Exhibition designer, Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision

14 July 2014