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.