Have a magical night, wherever you are!
Thanks for stopping by here once in a while this year. And I hope I will see you in 2016, when I will share a lot of new paintings, patterns and photos. There will be a couple of my success stories coming your way right in January. See you on the other side!
Like this year 2015, also my pattern challenge of the year is coming to its end. And my final patterns are a collection I have developed last month, in Chelsea’s Challenge of the Textile Design Lab.
The theme was a WGSN trend for spring/summer 2017 called Tidal Beachcomber, with surface patterns that are reminiscent of objects washed up on the beach, water ripples and feel like looking through clear ocean waters to the ground. Lots of blue, for sure!
And as I have gone through quite a blue inspiration phase on our vacation on Mallorca this fall, I used some of my photos and sketches for this pattern collection. And I also had fun with bubble wrap for making textures:
There was a great pattern tutorial provided by Chelsea von Hasseln with some very helpful Photoshop tricks. And here is my pattern collection:
These patterns would work well for apparel and home décor, which are my two favourite markets.
So what’s coming next? I will continue pattern designing, for sure, because it is my love and passion. But I will think about a new way of showing them on my blog and website next year. And I will work more on collections, so maybe there will be “A Collection a Month”?
The next collection is definitely on its way. I have been wanting to design a tropical pattern collection ever since our trip to Thailand this summer, so I nearly jumped for joy when Chelsea’s Challenge for December was announced – Tropical Iridescence, another WGSN trend for Spring/Summer 2017, bold tropical patterns with a night glow. Creating in a creative community always gives me just the push I need. So this is what I will be up to this December, which very warmly counteracts the winterly Advent challenge. See you with new patterns in 2016!
So we have come to the last page of Claras Calender of 2015 today:
And we have already had the first snow of this season on November 22. Only a couple of centimeters and most of it melted on the ground straightaway. But as you might imagine, the girls were very excited on that Sunday morning and couldn’t put on their warm clothes quickly enough to go outside – a build a mini snowman.
December is a whole lot of fun for the girls. Like a non-stop celebration. Carolina had her fourth birthday only a couple of days ago and Clara will be nine shortly before Christmas. There is advent calendars and St. Nicholas Day and Christmas parties and, and, and. And you know what their mother/me is – a Christmas Grinch. But having the girls has really softened my heart. And to make a virtue out of necessity, I have found a way to make this Christmas season more fun for me – I will doodle my way through it.
Johanna Fritz and her 365doodles has prompts for every day and after I have only drawn little in November, it is a good thing to rekindle. Thirty minutes of drawing practice every day do make such a difference in how I feel and it was pure fun today drawing advent wreaths:
There is another Instagram pattern and drawing challenge before Christmas by the recently founded Four Corners Art Collective. They are a group of seven über-talented surface pattern designers from all over the globe, preparing for Surtex 2016. I had the pleasure to connect with them in the ABSPD courses this year. Their prompt for December 1 was baubles and Christmas ornaments:
Drawing will definitely help me enjoy the pre-Christmas season more and see it in a different creative light. And build up my Christmas portfolio which is empty apart from one meagre design I made in MATS B (you can see it here).
And it already had another great side effect. While researching baubles online, I found these beautiful and easy DIY-baubles on Pinterest, which meant a pleasant afternoon spent Christmas crafting with the girls.
It is all about changing perspective for me. This December.
I haven’t done a Pink Moment for a while, so now it’s time again, because it was just too good:
This is a pink pigment I experimented with for painting. And it is special pigment for me, because it is a gift from my art buddy Doris Reske from her recent trip to Venice to see the Biennale – Doris also took some cool photos on Instagram during her stay. Molto grazie!
November is definitely a special month. Not only because my younger daughter’s birthday is at the end of it and a lot of November is spent talking about how many nights there are still left to sleep before her big day arrives.
November itself is a mysterious month to me, a time for retreat, contemplation, letting go and meditation, which I find a strange. Blame it on my zodiac sign of Gemini, that likes to stay in shallow and preferably tropical waters (or building castles in the air). But now that secretive sting of Scorpio clearly effects my state of mind and my emotions along with all these days getting shorter and the dusk that falls earlier every single day.
No, I am not depressed. I am not even melancholic, clearly I just have no time for that ;-). You might remember my recent dabbling in photography while vacationing on Mallorca and taking iPhone pictures to the prompts of photographer Catherine Just (part 1, part 2 and part 3). When she announced that she would be offering a 10-day-course in Conceptual Photography in November with the title Begin Deepening, I thought that this could work together well with November energy.
I was not nearly as productive photo-wise during this course like I was on Mallorca during the Instagram photo challenge, but I learned a couple new things about how to approach Conceptual Photography and what it actually is. Catherine Just gave us guidance how to express inner secrets with photography in the outside world using also different tools like journaling and mind-mapping. How you can work with surrogates, alternative spaces, self portraits and series. You can approach it quite methodically or intuitively (or both).
And one night after I came home from a yoga class, I made some photos before midnight. Intuitively. Can you guess what my secret is?
This thing with secrets. I just found it difficult, because I consider myself quite an open book and have no secrets really – or maybe I haven’t digged deep enough. But that air of mysteriousness does linger in these photographs and whatever YOU see in it, is right for you. You don’t have to really know that these things in my hands are toys and crafted gifts from my girls or about my prior stream of consciousness involving a certain change in my body, medical checks, little worries and a general feeling of unknowingness. And all is GOOD now.
What you can see is, that students are always influenced by their teacher’s style – so am I. Yes, Catherine Just uses black and white photography, the square format, certain filters and subjects in her art – that is what drew me to her soulful work in the first place. This photography process is about exploration and learning for me – and my perspective has shifted during this course. One word of advice for me – stay away from the Hipstamatic TinType app – it’s addictive!
I photographed this series last night on my way to yoga class and back – these stars were just to captivating and do seem to tell a story. A secret they want to tell me maybe?
I designed my pattern for this week for the Spoonflower contest Moon Phases. It is another pattern from my Mallorca holiday and was created under the influence of the full moon there, right in front of our balcony:
I like circles and circle-based designs and this geometric pattern came together in Illustrator:
Head over to Spoonflower to see all the other fantastic designs, I especially like the patterns with a hand-made and textural touch, unlike mine ;-). Great inspiration!
This weekend my art buddy Doris Reske and me packed a lot of our smaller work and some paintings into a suitcase and put up at a stand at a local arts & crafts fair called Koffermarket here in Oldenburg. It was Doris idea to give it a try, besides doing our classical exhibitions and art shows. Usually this bi-annual market is more of a sew-knit-craft-jewellery-thing, but once we were accepted for the last available stand we thought it would be a good idea to do it. Doris has created a huge number of postcard-sized work this year and I also had a considerable amount of smaller framed paintings (you can see tidbits from our Colab 6 here). I got an older suitcase from my mother-and-law and exhibition-pro Doris had all the other props ready so we could go!
The Koffermarkt takes place at changing locations around Oldenburg. After having been a visitor at the markets in hip cafés and the theatre, our own premiere was at the lobby of Oldenburg University.
The day really flew by with lots of people coming to the market on this grey (but not rainy) November day. And it must be the target group of this market, young creative DIY mamas – I met so many of my yoga students from prenatal and mama & baby yoga classes.
And we sold quite a bit! Doris sold her “postcards” and I also sold a couple of my postcard-sized works and six framed paintings. Three paintings/collages from 2014 and three from this year. A success!
Thanks everybody, who dropped by and said hello and thank you everybody, who bought a piece. I hope, you will enjoy having them in your houses as much as I loved painting them.
My pattern of the week is another variation of the hibiscus theme from last week. I also designed it on holiday on Mallorca and used photos of hibiscus flowers I came across during our stay. I experimented with blur modes, pixelation and also rendered the flowers in some ways digitally.
The pattern in the top-left corner was my original colourway and the other patterns are variations – I really can’t decide which one I like best. The original is vibrant, the red patterns feels asian and, of course, there must be a pink one. But for some reason I also feel very much drawn to the blue variation. The pattern is really large-scale – the repeat tile is 100 x 100 cm. I created the pattern concept as a submission for jovoto’s Textile Orbit.
The pattern is versatile for womenswear – on dresses, blouses, trousers, scarfs and also swimwear:
With this grey and rainy November weather outside it feels so good looking at something so summery!
I like to get my hands and studio messy with glue and papers from time to time and make some collage. It is a relaxing and surprising process and can be spread over a couple of days, with working on the different layers for a couple of minutes and then go back to kids, house, yoga and everyday life and come back to the collage with fresh eyes later again.
To learn some new techniques I signed up for the course 30 Days of Collage with Stephanie Levy and I really fell in love with image transfers with packing tape (you can find a great tutorial for it here). In my paintings and photography I like working with layering and now I can add transparent layers to collages with packing tape image transfers. This was my first experiment and I used mainly cool colours.
With this collage I aimed for a monochromatic look, but me being me, I had to use some pink also:
The German copy reads: expect the unexpected.
I made the first two collages before going on our holiday to Mallorca and when I came back two weeks later, after all those blue shades of the Mediterranean sea and sky, I had to dive into a lot of pink and warm colours:
The copy reads: that is now. the most important thing. a dream.
For my collages I used papers that I have collected over time and a lot of images, especially of the ladies, come from women’s magazines and fashion catalogs. And maybe because of my recent work in jovoto’s Textile Orbit designing patterns for womenswear, my collages look a bit like fashion moodboards.
Being on the island of Mallorca those past two weeks, right in front of our hotel, I saw a lot of pink hibiscus. I am not such a big fan of those flowers and find them a tad overused in all kinds of tropical designs (which I had a lot of time to study on swimwear at the beach), but still they called my name and wanted to be used in a pattern. Looking through trend reports I felt attracted by a trend for spring/summer 2016 called saturated florals with bold colours, simplified floral shapes and a luscious, exotic feel.
And these hibiscuses seem to have been calling me for a while, because I went back to sketches from last autumn’s holiday on Gran Canaria. It was then that I took Module 1 of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design e-courses and did a lot of floral sketching. It is so true – never throw away anything (art-related I must say), it could be just what you need at a later date.
I had to test it out on swimwear, of course:
And I am very happy to say, that this pattern is now available for licensing through my agency Patternbank. I find, it looks also great on a dress or bedding.