Profile

Salli Brand is a painter, artist and sculptor with qualifications in home construction, welding and electrical work.  She has written various magazine articles and books on decorating and DIY and made several television appearances. She made one series of 'Change That' for BBC 1 and 'The House' for the Discovery Channel. She appeared in BBC Breakfast News promoting her new book 'Girls' Guide to DIY'.

Biography

Salli Brand was always artistic, but her earliest work with brushes was as a Finger Print Technician. A rather indirect career path led from Scotland Yard to Lloyds of London where Salli became a broker, but her love of painting coincided with the height of the paint effects vogue.  Course after course of stencilling, ragging, rolling and marbling eventually led to her abandoning financial security for life as a freelance decorator.  Her paint effects, murals and trompe l’oeil grace the interiors of private homes, and increasingly hotels and new developments.

Her artistic capabilities extend to murals and latterly sculptures, mostly in steel and glass, made to commission.  It is this work with steel that encouraged the welding qualification and the constant need to move sockets and install lighting to complement her paint works led to Salli qualifying as an electrician. As well as her artistic work Salli now takes on major electrical work, in fact she recently said that she’s at her happiest on a building site.  She may be a petite blonde, but she can hold her own in a man’s world – especially with the right power tools!

Salli’s books have generated 19 foreign language editions starting with The Ultimate Book of Paint Effects and The Ultimate Book of Doing Up Old Junk where she was editor and contributor. She then went on to work with Murdoch Books on two immensely successful series.  She wrote Decorative Walls for the In A Weekend books and three books for the Makeover series – The Living Room, The Bathroom and The Dining Room. The books led to television and Salli appeared on Change That on BBC 1, and a long running series of inserts on the Discovery Channel.

Salli’s latest book is Girls’ Guide to DIY, which demystifies a wealth of masculine sounding challenges from putting up bookshelves to replacing a ballcock. This book is very timely, as research shows that more and more women are prepared to try DIY. Salli doesn’t want to bypass men, but to empower women and make them able to change their surroundings and cope in an emergency – the book is written with a great deal of humour and even gives tips on what to do if, or rather when, you fall off a ladder!