Elou Carroll Creative was at one point a dream, a dream of an airy office in a quaint little house somewhere surrounded by hills. It is the side project of Elou Carroll herself and hopes to one day grow big enough and strong enough that the word 'side' slips away. It has been in the making since 2011 and has finally been released into the wild to provide whimsical fine art, wedding, event and portrait photography (of all shapes, sizes and mythical denominations), and print design for like-minded people.
Elou Carroll Creative is founded on the belief that everything can be made beautiful and that every story is worth telling.
Elou Carroll is an apparel and merchandise designer by day, and a writer and freelance creative by night, specialising in print design and whimsical photography. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with English Literature from the University of Chester and a Master of Arts in Publishing from the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, based at Oxford Brookes University.
After moving away from home for the first time, when she was finding her feet, Elou fell in love with photography. But not just any photography, the kind of photography that makes you wonder whether or not you might be dreaming. Elou likes making stories out of light and girls in beautiful clothing, and she loves putting clouds where clouds shouldn't be.
She was once told, by a wonderful tutor, that her imagination was too big for a small studio, she likes to believe that is true.
Her design know-how is self-taught and it's all her mother's fault. When she was small, her mother would sit at her desk typing up manuscripts and typesetting books from a small publishing house (which Elou would one day intern for). Elou watched every single time (while racking up a larger-than-necessary electricity bill by ignoring the television even though it was on).
When university rolled around, Elou applied on a whim because she liked to write; she thought about how much she loved books and how she might want to write one, then she thought she might like to design them. She looked, too, at the pictures on the covers and thought, perhaps, she might like to take them. With that, she finished her undergraduate studies and applied for a publishing degree, and some how managed to fall into a book design role at the end of it after worrying that perhaps a creative writing degree wasn't the correct degree for someone who wanted to end up designing books, taking photographs and generally creating beautiful things. (Whoops.)
You can find her writing at ElouCarroll.com.