(Re-)embracing my love of navy blue and ivory, I’ve uploaded a few new designs to my Spoonflower shop.
I have a few more silo-style patterns to upload, so please keep an eye on my shop in the new few weeks.
Another year of the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search
On Friday, I submitted my entry for the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search. This was my third year of creating work for this competition, and it proved to be as challenging and rewarding as ever.
This year, we were given a story about a fictitious young woman who lived in Brooklyn. The brief showed us a picture of her (and her clothing style), where she shopped, where she worked, products she'd buy, products she sold in her shop, the food truck she stopped at, and so on. With this type of person in mind, the assignment was to create a patterned sneaker that she could wear when she bicycled to work. The patterned shoe also needed to incorporate at least one word, hand-written or an actual font.
Although I really liked this approach of getting a visual story about the client, I did find it tricky to create something for a person I couldn't really relate to, while still keeping myself in the art. So I focused on whatever images I was drawn to in the brief.
In her shop, she sold some darker, occult-type of items, so I decided to go with a crow theme. They are one of my favorite birds – strong, smart and ominous, and I knew I would enjoy drawing them.
She also sold some pretty, Parisian-style gifts, which made me envision using a loose, dreamy watercolor style for my pattern.
I drew my shoe template with a sharpie, painted several crows (you can see one of them here), and this is the mockup I submitted, followed by the actual pattern...
Geometric Patterns for summer school 2015
As I wrote in my last post, I'm taking another Make it in Design course with Rachael Taylor this summer. My previous post was about my intermediate track submission, but I also submitted to the advanced track.
The advanced assignment focused on "Past Modern," with keywords like ornate, ornamental, geometric, and laser cut. Although I initially spent my time drawing floral elements (which I've done plenty of in the past), I decided to try some geometric shapes in Illustrator, and I ended up with a whole new group of work that I really enjoyed creating.
Below are several of my new patterns, both ornate/floral and geometric (top left was what I'd submitted for the final online gallery)...
Summer school with surface patterns and design, intermediate track
I am again taking summer school with Rachael Taylor's Make it in Design (I took the course last year as well and blogged about it here and here). Since it's only a couple assignments, I enrolled for both the intermediate and the advanced tracks this time.
For the first intermediate assignment, we worked with an "organic decay" theme. I love rusty and chipped textures, and I use them in most of my collages, but I'd never really considered creating printed textiles with them.
I tried a few different styles, but I submitted this rusty orange one on top. Although I'd be more inclined to wear the black-splash texture below it, I felt the orange would stand out more as a thumbnail in the online gallery. I've attached a few more ideas as well.
I'd love to hear what you think. Comments are always welcome.
New floral sketches and drawings
I've been wanting more practice with textile designs lately, so I spent a chunk of time this week turning my recent floral sketches into patterns.
After scanning my ink drawings, I opened them in Illustrator and used the Live Trace function to turn them into vector art. I then brought all the vector elements into InDesign, mixing and matching one drawing with another, to assemble the designs.
I scanned in pages from West Elm and Crate and Barrel, and I used InDesign's eyedropper tool to create swatches of colors from the images. Then I tested out various background colors for my patterns using these color combos.
Here are some of the final patterns, as mocked up in my Society6 shop: