I am very honoured to be a featured designer on the Patternobserver blog in cooperation with SURTEX New York. I am utterly proud to be showing a couple of my designs with Pattern Observer Studio at Surtex in New York this May. For those of my friends and followers who would like to know a bit more about my way into textile design and why I am excited to go to Georgia in the former Soviet Union this summer, please find the link to the feature here https://patternobserver.com/blog/
As you might have guessed from my artwork, there is nothing I like designing more then tropical prints. Let me tell you a little story from my designer’s life. One day in mid-November 2016 (like Nothern Germany grey rainy cold November, actually we had had the first snow that week) I came across an e-mail that had landed in my spam folder (that I nearly deleted) titled ‘Interested in a tropical print collaboration?’ That was not a spam mail. It came from Isy Obi from Isy B. Design, a fashion designer from the Cayman Islands – could it get more tropical? Isy B. designs luxury Caribbean fashion and resortwear and Isy Obi won the title of Lifestyle Designer of the Year at Phoenix Fashion Week 2016. Can I say that I was more then interested!
Thanks to our modern world of e-mail, Skype and WeTransfer (and some good old post service to send a spool of thread in just the right colour we needed for the designs from the Cayman Islands over the pond to Germany) we communicated about the print collection, style, customer, revisions, testprints, production and, and and … (hello, steep learning curve!).
Isy B. asked me to design a ‘Mermaid Collection’ for summer 2018, consisting of 4 placement prints for kaftans and T-shirt dresses and one more abstract allover print for dresses and other garments. We agreed on seahorse, coral, seaweed and mermaid tail prints.
These are the kaftans:
And the T-shirt dresses:
The allover print is an abstracted mermaid tail with more underwater elements in a tropical colour palette:
The graphic turquoise/white seaweed print also made it unto a couple of garments for a relaxed and luxurious look:
You can see more of Isy B. Design’s fashion on their website and here is the link to her 2018 Lookbook. And I am more then happy to announce that we have officially started working on Isy B. Design’s new fashion collection for 2019.
And wow! Tennis champion Caroline Wozniacki is wearing one of our creations!
Happycloth is a recently launched Greek company producing top-quality handmade silk scarves. I coudn’t be more proud when I found out that they chose 12 designs out of 45,000 textile patterns, and two of them were mine, ‘Leopink’ and ‘Ditsy’.
What makes them furthermore special is that the company decided to sell each scarf with the story of the inspiration and process of the design and asked the artists to contribute their background stories.
The scarves are produced in the northern Greek town of Soufli and come in two sizes, 30cm square and 45cm square.
If you are looking for a Christmas present, Happycloth was so generous as to give my blog readers a 15% discount on their scarves, just use the coupon code CGBLOG upon checkout.
Here is an interesting article about the two cool Greek guys (both named Konstantinos) that started the company and sell their products on markets like London Portobello Road worldwide.
As textile designer, yoga teacher and Pilodendron lover I am threefold delighted that South African yoga wear brand Shakti Shanti has licensed one of my designs.
My design ’50 Shades of Philodendron’ is now called Leafy Print and available here.
After taking a summer pause due to travelling and summer holidays I loved coming back to my #the100dayproject and creating the last patterns.
You can still see the tropical influence from my trip to Cuba and then the change of seasons from summer to early autumn (falling colourful leaves, spider webs, grey rainy days). I love how life influences art.
And here is the whole thing:
I really enjoyed this project and have achieved exactly what I wanted to learn when I started out – learn my way around on the iPad Pro which has now has become part of my design process. And I keep learning and designing and learning and evolving.
I am excited that two fresh activewear designs of mine were licenced and released on FLEO shorts in June and July.
That makes four this year and I think there is even more to come.
I like how diverse my designs are, they started out as textures painted with watercolour, photographs or even doodling on my iPad Pro. One of the most rewarding parts (except for the creative process itself) is seeing your designs come to live on real products and real people wearing them – I admit to sometimes searching #fleoshorts on Instagram to see them in action in real life. Very motivating!
![image[7]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image7.jpeg)
It’s been already three weeks since we came back from our three weeks of travelling in Cuba. And now that everything is unpacked, the photos are downloaded, the stories have been told dozens of times and the whole travel experience has become categorized in my brain and body it is time to show some impressions on my blog too.
I wanted tropical and Caribbean and I got tropical and Caribbean 😉 and so much more, living history of communism and colonisation, extremely nice people, perfect beaches, as much delicous mango as my heart wanted, colour and fumes overload and I came back with a full sketchbook of my daily watercolour travel moods and sketches of tropical flora.
We travelled independently (my husband and our two daughters aged 5 and 10), our route was Havana-Cienfuegos-Trinidad-Santa Clara-Varadero-Matanzas-Havana. We stayed at private accomodation called ‘casas particulares’ with local families, artists, musicians and doctors.
I could write a whole book about our trip, but I will let the pictures and my husband’s photos speak.
![image[6]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image6.jpeg)
![image[1]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image1.jpeg)
![image[8]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image8.jpeg)
While my husband was taking these amazing photos of Cuban life, I was more busy with photographing tropical foliage for future designs and sketches, especially I was on a mission for the perfect banana leaf.
![image[3]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image3.jpeg)
![image[2]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image2.jpeg)
![image[9]](http://cathringressieker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image9.jpeg)
Right after coming back home I had an outpouring of tropical designs, yes, you can take the girl out of the jungle, but you cannot take the jungle out of the girl 😉
These and more are now available for licensing via my Patternbank account.
That’s another 45 new patterns. all created on the iPad Pro:
The muse does show up, every single day! That’s what one the things I have learned during this time. I have to be dedicated also and make the time and effort to sit down and start creating. And usually one idea (sometimes just a little flicker of the mind) a day is enough to start the creative juices flowing. I have had floral explosions and quiet days. And more often then not I found myself opening one of the Adobe apps – Draw, Sketch, Capture and PhotoshopMix, which made it easy to transfer them into Photoshop and Illustrator. 26 patterns have already ben put into repeat and are now available for licensing via my Patternbank account.
These last nine designs show an increase in tropical activity I see now that I have put them together. Not intentional at all, but very forward-looking indeed, as I will be sitting on a plane tomorrow heading towards the Caribbean. Three weeks of travelling with my family and that also means digital detoxing and no iPad Pro, but a real paper sketchbook, pens and watercolours. My #the100dayproject will be pausing for a while, but I will be back with fresh energy, fuelled by new adventures, experiences, people, food, flowers, flora, colours, smells and inspiration – and a full sketchbook, camera roll and traveller’s heart.
It’s been over a year since our first CoLab anniversary in March last year and as I was riding my back home from Doris Reske‘s and my 23rd Colab painting session this morning, I thought it was time for an update. So we have added another 11 painting sessions!
We had such a lovely May here in Northern Germany that we could start our outdoor Garden CoLabs again, working on smaller canvases.
Last week we put five of our CoLab paintings on display in Oldenburg’s brandnew YogaLoft located right in the city (where I also teach prenatal yoga classes).
The paintings are a perfect fit for the yoga studio and the awesome owner Ananda was as delighted as we were with ‘Vishuddha’, ‘Chakra Dance’ and ‘Shakti Mandala’.
And here are some impressions of today’s painting session, which felt very light and energetic at the same time.
The CoLabs are taking a little summer break now as each of us is going on vacation, but we will be back for sure, full of fresh colours, inspiration and summer mojo!
Today I am 40 days into #the100dayproject so I thought it is time for a little recap. The iPad Pro has now become one of my daily working tools and it feels totally normal to use it every day.
For Patternmash’s weekend project Terrazzo I decided to do it entirely on the iPad Pro with Procreate. Adobe Capture’s pattern feature always feels a bit of cheating because it is so quick, but I like using my hand painted watercolour sketches to produce tile patterns. Paintstorm studio is a cool tool, because it has a so-called seamless mode that let’s you create repeating patterns straightaway.
Day 19-27 were April days full of rain and spring flowers (tulips, tulips, so many tulips this season) that inspired me which surely is reflected in these patterns.
And then my love for everything tropical came forward again!
My favourite Philodendron plant inspired me (I now have one in the home!) and also banana leaves, Caladium and Sansevieria (I learned a new botanical term here). What about a next project #100daysoftropicalmotifs?
Some patterns take minutes and some take hours (and not necessarily look better). I practiced some digital painting which I think is something that I will explore further (now that you can also use the fantastic Kyle brushes in Adobe Sketch). A couple of patterns I have already taken into Photoshop and put into repeat and are now available for licensing via my Patternbank account.
#the100dayproject is a wonderful and also a bit scary thing. Showing up every day and trusting that the muse will show up too, and such a learning curve for sure.