Orange Sweater Design

Stamp time...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friend Shade with the sole purpose of doing something arty.  The project of the day was to carve our own stamps.  For several hours...wow, what a lovely quiet time on a rainy afternoon!This was the first stamp I made - I picked one of the flowers from some of the pattern work I had done earlier.  You might recognize it.  I'm noodling around with the idea of making this my business logo, but I'll see where it takes me.

Then I worked on a second one that was a little more abstract and I feel like it has all kinds of potential for print and pattern!  Different colors, maybe running off the page, or starting in the middle.  The juices are flowing...

Below are a couple of prints from the stamps Shade carved - I just love how she left the rough texture around the edge of these.  It really makes them look like old-school wood carved prints, don't you think?

And I always appreciate it when you can see an artist's process in the finished work.

Thanks to Shade for getting me over to her house, serving me lovely teas, showing off her amazing new studio space and being an overall inspiration!

A brief post...

Hello all -

My energy has been kind of sapped this week, and so the time I usually blog has been substituted with sleep!  A good thing overall.  I'm still plugging away and trying to keep up with the Surface Design E-course I'm taking, so some of my time has been absorbed with that as well.

Today I'll just post a small piece that I worked on for the class.  I used Illustrator this time and colored up some of my older tree design work.  The challenge was to come up with a wrapping paper for spring using Pantone's color of the Year:  Tangerine Tango.

I'd say it's more fall-ish.  But I had fun nonetheless!  Maybe I'll do another version with an orange background instead of a yellow one - and maybe add a little background texture.  They seem like they're kind of floating...which is kind of how I feel this week anyway...so there you go.

The assignments

Well, I'm finally getting around to becoming familiar with Adobe Illustrator and oh, such fun!  Again the learning curve is rather steep and slow, but I definitely feel like I'm making progress.

Here's an assignment we had for the pattern class to find and develop a color palette from a set of images of our choosing.  I made this little board in Illustrator and matched the colors by using the eyedropper tool to pick out the colors from the photographs.

I feel like someone who's been working at J Crew for 35 years picking color names for their sweaters.  SO funny!

Then I went on to using some of my drawings to create a pattern in Illustrator - it's not finished, but as I've said before, I don't mind if things look like they're a little unfinished or perhaps, still in the making.

It was really fun to play with where the petals would best be blue, or perhaps left plain white.  The other nice thing that illustrator does is make the lines into "vector" objects which means that the linework is very smooth.  In other programs the linework becomes pixelated - which is ok - unless you want to change the sizes of things and then it gets a little more bumpy.

In any case, there will be lots more, I assure you, and if these evolve, I'll show them too.

The Art and Business...

Today I'll talk about the on-line class I'm taking to help forward my dream of being a Surface Pattern Designer.  It's called:

and it's offered by Beth Nicholls and Rachael Taylor from Great Britain.  (You can click the image above to get to the class description web site).  They're both amazing and accomplished women and I've learned so much already!  It's a three module course and I completed the first module back in December. 

Of course, given that this has to squeeze into the crannies of my life, I still have a lot to learn even from that first session.  However, the second module started this week, and oh it's so exciting!

While the first module was really focused on finding your style and teaching key technical methods to create digital images, this module is more about how to market them and put collections together.

It's really got my juices flowing, needless to say, and I wish I had a lot more time to practice and play.

This said, it will always be here and I'll find my way along when it's time.

In the meantime, I thought I'd just briefly share how a pattern design might come together.  So first, perhaps you'd go out and look for some inspiration.  Say...this!

Then you'd come back and look at it and do some doodling around with different pens, pencils, scales, and all that.

And then you pick out a piece that think you like a lot - and it becomes a "motif".  (Very important word in this world.)

After that, you can scan it in and oh the magic you can work in Photoshop or Illustrator.  Like this ~ using a different example. First there's a bit of floral:

Plus some sketchy lines:

and you add a little color and do some arranging and you can get something like this! 

or this:

Isn't it great?  I'll be sharing lots more as I dive into this further.  Man the learning curve is steep - and I'll have to practice a lot more, but I'm really excited about what I've learned so far.  So stay tuned for more!