Happy Birthday

Wishing my Sister, a very Happy Birthday.

A sketch before Tea

Mittens Gift Wrap Design.

I do like to enter the Spoonflower contests. It is a great way to keep practising patterns. Here is my entry for Mittens Gift Wrap.

Fall Leaves Designs

Trying to lighten the palette, this is my Spoonflower entry for the Fall Leaves Designs Contest.

Sketchbook doodles

Good old fashioned pen and ink, can't beat it!

Spoonflower Ghost Pattern

Here is the Ghost repeat pattern design I entered in to the recent Spoonflower challenge. I opted for a simple yet typical ghost silhouette.

To Change or Not To Change?!

I am in the process of giving my blog a bit of a design change, making it cleaner and brighter.
I was thinking of updating my logo at the same time. I love my little logo as it represents a Cinderella type concept for me. Not so much the rags to riches theme but personal growth in terms of starting from scratch and building on it.

This is my original logo on the left and the new idea on the right. To me, it seems to lack something from the original.

 

Reign Repeats

Has anyone else stumbled across the fab Skillshare website at skillshare.com?

I decided to take the plunge and enrol in a class to help widen my design knowledge after seeing it advertised on other blogs.
I chose Reign Repeats: Create Perfect repeat patterns in Illustrator by Majo Bautista V - Owner and Designer at MaJoBV.

The idea behind the class was to learn how to design a repeat pattern to be submitted to a Spoonflower contest. The contest had a picnic theme.
I really enjoyed it. The class attracted a lot of other creative minds, Graphic Designers, Surface Pattern Designers and opened up a whole new community with an extra group section on Facebook where the class can keep in touch.
The class starts with your first design concepts on paper being transferred to the computer, practicing using Illustrator, vectorising, creating motifs with colour and texture to creating repeat layouts with basic old school methods and also the new pattern tool.
These are two of my designs I created below and I am very pleased with how they turned out.

2013 Global Talent Search Entry

I think I may have taken a bit of a risk with this one. When I started brainstorming old fashioned playgrounds, I kept thinking back to what sort of things I can remember seeing and also what type of playground games could fit in with the theme as well.

In our garden we have this huge chalkboard for the children which they love. You can guarantee that almost every time we go outside, the chalkboard is used.

Then the idea hit me to combine playground apparatus with chalkboard imagery for an old school affect and this is what I came up with.

I am happy with the outcome, the risk I think is the lack of colour.

Good Luck to all of the participants.

2013 Global Talent Search

The brief has been set and the theme is old fashioned playground Journal Cover for Paperchase.

 

Initial character sketch.

Ready, Steady, Global Talent Search 2013

You know when you get the feeling that something is going on but you can't quite put your finger on it. Well there has been a steady build up of murmurings around the creative community lately and the excitement is all about the new Lilla Rogers Studio Global Talent Search. A fantastic chance to win representation from the Lilla Rogers Studio for two years internationally.

 

   

 

I have signed myself up and cannot wait to begin.

BLOGHOP

I came across a great idea today that I would like to share. I love looking at other designers work, the creativeness and individuality, the way the world is perceived in many different ways.
The whole idea of a blog hop is new to me so when I saw the 'Let's Fly!' Blog hop advertisement on Facebook I couldn't resist a peak. The whole thing is curated by; Believe creative studio www.believe-cs.com and starts at www.patternaddict.blogspot.fr
The idea is that a large group of designers/ bloggers showcase their surface pattern designs, (based on one shared brief - Let's Fly!) on their own blogs with a link to another designers blog and work after, and so on. You continue to follow each link until you reach the end.
The theme is about their first journey/flight into new careers as surface pattern designers. Each individual design collection incorporates the Pantone colour of the year 2013- Emerald 17-5641 TCX.
It really is a visionary delight and a must to try!
Be quick it runs from 10-13 January 2013

New Year, New Beginnings

Firstly Happy New Year to you all.

Last year was a great year in the sense I finally graduated from University. A big milestone for me seeing as I mainly studied part time whilst looking after two small children.
This year I hope to get my illustrations or designs for surface pattern noticed in the public eye. It will be a new venture which will be challenging, nerve racking and exciting all at the same time. I have started to create a few little designs that can be seen on Spoonflower which is on going in my style development.
Also instead of just sharing my own work, I will be trying to share all of the interesting new blogs/websites I have been coming across lately.