Studio Time: Flower Stand Fabric

I'm so excited about my fabric from Spoonflower! The print turned out as good (maybe better?) than the design board. It's very cool to see the fabric in person. I'm planning to make a dog carrier for my dog, Sophie. I made a mistake on the repeat and lost the original file (so annoying), so I'm fixing that and will get it uploaded. I'll share the bag when I finish. 

Studio Time: Second Collection from a single motif

I've been continuing in the series of how I created my simple collections out of a single motif. 

Cheery Crazy Daisy Collection

The other design I picked up on was what looked like a stylized daisy. I love daisies. I started with the colorful check pattern on the top right. I loved the pastel colors. Then I started playing more. I started out with a more colorful and whimsical placement of the flowers. I ended up with some more traditional motifs on the top left by sticking with two colors and a traditional placement. 

Bedding Mock-Up

I would love to see this as a girl's bedding collection. A little different because it's blue in the background, but still feminine with the pastel colors and daisy motifs. I am a girl who prefers less traditional feminine colors, but still like bedding that says "girl," this is the type of bedding I would love in my home.

Blue Crazy Daisy Collection

I took the above collection and toned it down to a two-color set in blue and white set. A more adult version of the above set.

Studio Time: Flower Stand Collection

I'm planning to make a shopping bag out of this collection. I am having the designs printed through Spoonflower. I'll share the results when I get the fabric. So cool to have an option to be able to print your own designs on fabric! After I proof the fabric, I can make the designs available for sale to the public. 

Artfully Meandering: Ornithology Lessons

Watching my parents bird feeder is an ornithology lesson. Within 45 minutes, these are the birds that were visiting today. Plus a grackle. There was also a robin hanging out (but he doesn't he the seed). Sorry for the blurry photos, but these are speedy little critters.

Indigo Bunting

Papa Cardinal

Mama Cardinal

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

Papa House Finch
The mama House Finch was hanging out nearby 

Tufted Titmouse

Black-Capped Chickadee

I loved catching the birds in motion. I know, blurry, but the motion is still very cool.

Male cardinal in motion

House Finch in motion

Tufted Titmouse in motion

Most of the southern squirrels we've seen are small and thin. The squirrels that hang out under this bird feeder are chubby squirrels like the ones we've seen up north. There are three very fat squirrels that eat the seed flung out of the bird feeder by the birds.

South Carolina Squirrel

Artfully Meandering: Savory Sweet Potato Casserole

Living in the South, sweet potatoes and yams are in a lot of food. I love sweet potatoes. I am loving the current flavor rage of sweet and savory together. This sweet potato casserole recipe takes those lovely rustic vegetables and turns them into one spectacularly delicious meal. I'm currently obsessed with the flavor combinations in this recipe. 

Here was my casserole. It didn't even last a day. I'm making it again this weekend. The rosemary is that special final ingredient that takes this over the top. 

Studio Time: Breaking the line drawing apart

Cheery Blossom 2 - Line Sketch

In my last post I mentioned that I like to scan in a line drawing .jpg and use Image Trace in Illustrator to take the lines apart into components. I very much like the look of hand-drawn versus a completely computer drawn image (although I will experiment with that later). Even though I'm using Adobe Ideas which helps vectorize the drawing, there is still enough of "me" in the drawing that reflects my hand. 

I started with Cheery Blossom 2 above. Below is the design colored in and taken apart component by component. I like using the pieces, the lines, what was originally negative space, even the tiny innards of the center and using them in various ways. I find all of these pieces help create a cohesiveness in the final design because it all relates to each other. It's a digital version of "nothing goes to waste." 

On the top are the components taken apart completely. On the bottom, there are various combinations of two of the components. I'm going to experiment with the pieces below to create some different designs and different color ways. 

Studio Time: Whimsical Butterfly in a Wildflower Garden

I'm trying to get some of my designs out onto my Pinterest board. I have some upcoming posts about my process of creating these designs. I'm super loving this set. 

This entire design starts with this line sketch. By breaking this line sketch apart, I created the following two designs. I'll explain the process in a series of Friday Design posts. 

I found a little graphic of words that I thought expressed my design style. I created this when I was brand new to surface pattern design last year and as I develop my style, I find all of these words still very true. The two designs in the remaining part of the post really epitomize what I feel is the essence of my current design sensibility.

I love rustic designs. The gingham in this design represents the country side of rustic that I love. Even though it looks like there are a number of different wildflowers in the sketchy part of the design, it really is just a breakdown of the same line drawing above, just separated and remixed as many ways as possible. The sun is also part of the flower and the rays are just a stretched petal. This wildflower mix turned out exactly as I hoped. Maybe even better. This is very much how I sketch in freehand and to be able to assemble it in Adobe Illustrator and have it look hand-sketched (just a little better) makes me really happy. I like that my digital work can reflect my hand drawn work.

The whimsical butterfly is a painstaking assembly of the leaves and stems in the wildflowers, just expanded and placed to look more butterfly-y (I know, not a real word). The dots on the butterfly are more of the same flowers. 

The neon version was a very cool happy accident. I was trying to create a black border on the white background and the background turned black. When I saw it, it looked neon and I loved it. I think I'm liking this neon version a little better.

Artfully Meandering: Crazy Daisies

Artfully Meandering: An experimental butterfly design

Artfully Meandering: Experimenting with Adobe Creative Cloud

I have a subscription to the very cool Adobe Creative Cloud. For $50/month you get access to the entire suite of Adobe tools. I'm in love with Illustrator, Photoshop, and Ideas (an iPad app). 

I have loads of ideas for surface pattern designs. I really love this sketch and would love to turn the idea of this into designs.

I'm experimenting with using Ideas to create the bones of the design. When I first started experimenting with design, I would draw on paper and scan the images in as a .jpg, then use Illustrator to Image Trace and take each image apart line by line. I found I used all pieces of the image, the outline, the insides and they created a consistent pattern style for me. My goal now is to become totally digital. I'm always go to love paper, pen, and pencils. I want to start with a detailed design on paper like the above. That way I can draw freely. 

Now, to create a surface pattern design that I could use for fabric or house wares, I'm creating the components of the above design and will use the pieces to build a collection for a final design.

I started calling this a "Cherry Blossom" collection and did a typo and called it "Cheery Blossom." I rather liked it, so this has become the Cheery Blossom collection. Here are the sketches so far:

Cheery Blossom 1

Cheery Blossom 2

Cheery Blossom 3

Cheery Blossom 4

Cheery Buds

Cheery Grass Blades

Cheery Leaves

Cheery Branches