Christmas trees, snow flakes, deer, owls, robins, hedgehogs, and one spider have taken over the cloisters in Dulwich Picture Gallery!
A team of 5 from Planarama worked all day to install this exquisite Christmas display on the glass of the cloisters – for nothing.
Planarama is a design and production company specialising in window displays for major UK retailers (Habitat, Marks & Spenser’s, Cartier, Ted Baker, Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media…) and can also be spotted in the US and the Far East, and Dulwich Picture Gallery. (They have created the Christmas decorations for DPG twice before).
Neil Ellis, the big boss, had the idea at university and set the company up from scratch. It has been flourishing in Clapham ever since.
Quote from their website – ‘We believe that work should be fun. We love what we do and that shines through in the work that we create’ It certainly does!
How is it done?
The designs are created in Illustrator. They are developed further to fit the windows. 
They are then plotted onto frosted vinyl and cut by a computer. The negative parts are then removed by hand. The designs, on the backing paper, are applied with an applicator to the glass using water (helps eliminate air bubbles). 
The backing paper is carefully peeled off, and voila – a winter woodland appears! Tiny adjustments are completed with a scalpel.
Neil lives in Dulwich and he and his partner Stephen (the financial director of Planarama) are hugely supportive of the Gallery. Stephen has been on the Friends committee for years in charge of IT related matters and they had their civil partnership reception there.
2 Comments
As soon as the display went up I went and looked at it (I’d been told to look for the spider…) I found the spider, but while looking for it, discovered moles and squirrels and birds and had a lovely time looking – rather different from the old masters, but true to the spirit of Christmas – and aren’t people kind to us at Dulwich, doing all that out of love!
What a stunning and hugely elegant rendering of Christmas and winter time. Thank you so much to all the team at Planarama; it is so generous of them to give their time and creativity to DPG and us lucky Dulwich residents.