Pattern 38/52

Drawing and painting in my sketchbook is mostly just for my personal fun, exploration and relaxation. Rarely I sketch with a particular pattern-to-be in mind. But then, when I look at my sketches again after a while, they still may become patterns.

I drew this watercolour sketch in late August in my mother’s garden at the Baltic Sea:

And last weekend I taught a prenatal yoga teacher training at the North Sea, where these pink beauties caught my eye in the ashram’s garden:

I felt that these flowers could make a pretty pattern together and spend most of my pattern-making time this week actually erasing the background from these sketches and separate the different flower shapes in Photoshop. That was quite a meticulous and arduous thing to do, but once the last stray pixel was deleted, making the pattern and the repeat was like sunshine on a September day.

I gave my pattern the name “fall folk flowers” and added a dramatic black background:

I would love this dress!

And now I really feel like working with some clean vector shapes in Illustrator again.

Sep182015Sep 18 2015

A Week in Orange

Orange is not a colour I am normally drawn to, but this week I saw it everywhere.

From the glowing fall flora in town and the food on my table to the drawings in my sketchbook.

Sep132015Sep 13 2015

Pattern 37/52

At the beginning of this week I came down with quite a cold. For two days I didn’t feel too good and I helped my healing process with some wholesome food and a little sketching in the sun.

These sketches then became the starting point for a new pattern collection, that emerged quite naturally. I love the 1950s designs of Lucienne Day and Jacqueline Groag and decided to choose a midcentury modern colour palette with a fresh twist (and with no pink at all!). Looking at these colours felt soothing too.

I am happy with the result and healthy again.

Sep92015

Harvest Sketches

It is mostly my sketchbook I go to for drawing and painting these September days. And the total vegan foodie that I am, I love drawing all the good things that are in season right now. And then eating them. This is quite a challenge for me, especially with figs, that are one of my favourite fruits.

The potatoes come from our little stretch of garden behind the house, Hubby’s hobby, and we enjoyed our meagre, but delicious crop of 2015 oven-baked with Hokkaido (another favourite of mine). Speaking of favourites, every year I am anticipating the season of these little gherkins and then I like to eat them by the pound, and more. Raw, just like they are or lightly salted for a day the Russian way (“malosolniye”) my mother makes them for me when we come to visit in summer. My 8-year-old Clara acquired a taste for them also this summer for the first time.

I got totally addicted to chai tea when I went to India for the first time in 2004 and for a long time I thought I would never have chai again. No milk for me as a vegan and I can’t handle black tea very well anymore. But after Hubby surprised me with a chai recipe from an Indian cookbook a fortnight ago, I found out that I can make great vegan chai latte with soy, rice or oatmilk and with no black tea at all. Cooking these fabulous spices with water and vegan milk for about ten minutes makes a perfect flavourful drink for these cool September days.

Let’s see what I can ~~eat~~ draw next!

Sep62015Sep 6 2015

Pattern 36/52

My first pattern after the holidays is still very holiday-inspired. With a colour palette from this room in our bungalow on Koh Samet.

With some of these greens and pinks I created a pattern for the latest stoff’n design contest themed “arrows”.

A funny thing I learned about arrow patterns: even when all the arrows are in line and symmetrical, the pattern still looks wonky. Actually, I had never designed an arrow pattern before. So these contests are always a good way of stretching your creative muscles, getting some inspiration and motivation. And in my case, also a nice way of making the holiday feeling last a little bit longer.

Sep22015Sep 2 2015

Hello September!

I must admit, I was quite resistant to turn Clara’s calendar yesterday morning, as it meant the official ending of my favourite season of the year. And summer gave us a nearly tropical day and evening on August 31 as a farewell gift, so waking up to rain and dropped temperatures on September 1 felt natural and inevitable.

Fall, autum or whatever you might call it – it is Herbst in German – has arrived and even the air smells different now in the mornings when I step out into the garden with a cup of something hot in my hands. The playfulness and idleness of summer is coming to its end with all this talk about back to school etc. And it’s really true. Carolina is off to kindergarten again, my yoga classes started again on Monday (and after the summer pause I even got pleasantly sore muscles from my first day on the mat) and it is back to school tomorrow for Clara.

Cathrin Gressieker_autumn party — Harbingers of Autumn, sketches from my mother’s garden, last week of August

Cooler days, rainy afternoons, spending more time inside the house also means gettings things done again for me. Back to school is actually quite an exciting concept and I usually feel a rise in my productivity and creativity in fall. For September I am planning to learn some new things and skills, there are a couple of classes on Skillshare and Creativebug I would like to watch, I also signed up for the Textile Design Lab and will go through the class materials of the ABSPD Ultimate Portfolio Builder again. New patterns and paintings, I can feel them coming. And now back to work!

Sep12015

Colab 6

“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Henry James

It was exactly that – a perfect Sunday late-summery afternoon, spent in my garden with Doris Reske doing our Colab 6. We further worked on our monoprinted backgrounds from Colab V, adding line-work, paint pen and collage elements.

What has started as an experiment in March with our first collaborative session, has become a well-loved monthly artist date. And the spring seeds planted have become ripe fruit, so to say, because we sold our very first Co-Lab painting Golden Circle at our just-finished exhibition of the same name. And what we also found out – those little arty postcards also sell very well.

Doris great art studies sell like hot cakes with colleagues, friends and at exhibitions and she is producing them like a whirlwind. After our Co-Lab 6 I can now add some new ones to my little stack.

Aug292015Aug 29 2015

Pattern 30-35/52

It’s been a while since I posted my last pattern, nearly six weeks actually. And this was the time I took off this summer, for travelling with my family to Thailand, for being mostly offline and not missing much, for drawing with no aim in my sketchbook. For replenishing, filling the well, seeing and doing new things. So I have no new pattern to show yet.

But I can show you something I have been working on the weeks prior to my summer time off. In June and July I took the new MATS course – Creating Collections for Home Décor with art agent Lilla Rogers and art director Margo Tantau. This intensive five-week-course focused on five popular substrates (materials) often used on products: metal, fabric, glass, ceramics and wood. We were given three different trend boards for inspiration and I chose the one with a modern romantic French feel. Here you can see my collection for fabric, glass and ceramics.

After this course I see home décor in a completely new way, totally dissecting products in shops and other people’s houses. So, Anthropologie, what do you think?

Aug222015

My Thailand Sketchbook

I brought my sketchbook home brimming with sketches and the feeling of fun I had while drawing them. Nearly all of its hundred pages filled up with memories and the big and little things I saw and put to paper on our Thailand trip. Things, that a camera can’t capture this way. Mostly little things, like the fruit and food I loved to eat there:

And I gave myself full permission to play in my sketchbook, nothing had to become a pattern or a painting. It was all for my personal exploration, surprises and fun (just on some pages I tried something pattern-like):

I drew a lot of things I hadn’t drawn before:

And some people I knew very well:

I was always fascinated by the lush tropical flora:

And I totally fell in love with lotus buds:

And you know what?

I even started a new sketchbook:

Aug212015

A Taste of Thailand

I am slowly settling in back home. And as I usually feel instantly at home in the tropics, coming back to my actual home (which I Iove!) often feels like a reverse culture (and climate) shock. Putting together this collage brought back some the energy of our three weeks in Thailand.

in random order: our usual breakfast, beaches on Koh Samet, shells collected by the girls, markets in Chiang Mai and Pattaya, Buddha ruins in Ayutthaya, my beloved lotus buds in Bangkok.