Fabric from Little India in Bangkok, a sketchbook full of drawings, a coloring book from the airport, Chinese brushes from Chinatown in Bangkok, Micron pens bought in Chiang Mai, a dress from Pattaya, a stylus pen, a pouch and mini lotus buds from the world’s biggest weekend market. Plus a tan, wonderful travel stories, hubby that lost 4 kilograms while feasting on food every single day and 822 photos on my camera. More to come on over the next days.
Doris and me painted again last weekend – and this time we went from big size canvases to small cardboard pieces. And I felt like bringing my gelliplate into the game. So we spent a couple of lovely Sunday hours monoprinting while it was raining outside, once in a while one of my daughters joined us and Hubby was so presentable and supplied us with matcha lattes, vegan chocolate cookies – and pizza once the living room table was cleaned up again.
I have been working mostly digitally for most of June and July and have been drawing in my sketchbook – so the switch to messy paint took a little bit of courage again. But then the whole process of printing is so relaxing, you can work without expectations, go with flow and the results are always surprising. So my Sunday surprise was that a lot of my prints turned out having a Japanese style:
Or what I consider Japanese style from my European perspective. I have never been to Japan, but would really love to go one day.
My pattern design passion started last summer with signing up for the Make it in Design Summer School where I made my first pattern using collage and some design freeware. Since last summer I have taken a bunch of pattern design courses, like Jessica Swift’s Pattern Camp, all the modules of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, Bonnie Christine’s course on CreativeLive and Elizabeth Olwen’s Skillshare classes, learning something new in Photoshop and Illustrator basically every day.
And now – a year later – it is Summer School time again! I signed up for all three tracks, beginner, intermediate and advanced to be fully inspired and challenged.
The brief for the advanced track was to design a pattern to a trend called Past Modern / Reworked Classics inspired by traditional patterns, intricate ornamentations, paper cuts and laser cuts. A colour palette was provided and I wanted to make a pattern that felt suitable for a wedding, having a modern lace feel. Recent drawings from my sketchbook seemed very appropriate for this to me:
I image-traced these flowers in Illustrator, coloured them and started them moving them around until I felt the pattern was balanced.
The theme for the beginner track was Soft Pop – a trend for next spring / summer. I was already familiar with the colour palette and the concept as I had already designed a Soft Pop pattern before. For the new pattern I was inspired by 60s patterns. You can see my pattern and all the other wonderful submissions here in the Summer School gallery.
And here is the link to my pattern for the intermediate brief Eco Active / Organic Decay inspired by organics, textures and enviromental decay with camouflage-like patterns. For this pattern I combined three photos I made in my neighbourhood using Photoshop. And even when I thought in the beginning, I might skip this brief, it was the one I then enjoyed the most and I am still on the lookout for more organic textures around me.
This week’s pattern comes as a cooling summer breeze to you.
The process behind my “Blue Wisteria” was fun and experimental. I went back to my plant printing of summer 2012 (blogged about here).
The wisteria leaves came from my mother-in-law’s patio (and the pillows still sit around in my bedroom). For the new pattern I used a photograph of the printed plants, image-traced them in Illustrator and played around with the colour tools in Photoshop afterwards until I arrived at a colour combination that I liked. I especially like the textures of the pattern – all adding to its natural feel.
My summer patterning continues, with yummy summer inspiration all around us. Recently, we went strawberry picking with the girls on a local farm nearby.
Especially our little Carolina is very fond of strawberries and so I wanted to preserve some of this summer goodness in a pattern. And I had to draw my sketches quickly – these strawberries get eaten up so fast! I wanted a painterly and textured feel to the pattern and so I reused my ink-on-yupo-blobs from the cherry pattern. This pattern is called “strawberries and pink cream”:
I also tried a darker background for these mock-ups:
When Carolina saw the image of the strawberry pattern on the computer screen, she shouted happily: “Yummy strawberries!” Mission accomplished.
Today I turned Clara’s calendar and her favourite monthly page of them all is now hanging in our living room.
And her calendar is so right! Summer has arrived with its full glorious force this week, with the temperatures rising to new heights daily. Carolina asks for ice cream on a daily basis too – “It’s summer, Mama!” We will surely enjoy this month. Another three weeks of school and kindergarten and then, hard to imagine now, we will fly off on our summer holiday.
Looks like this could easily become my favourite month too.
With this week’s pattern I am exactly halfway through the year! And what should be in the middle of the year? Summer! The temperatures are hotting up finally and what can I bring you patternwise better than a cooling lemonade – my entry for this week’s Spoonflower contest. I wanted to combine yellow colour blobs with graphic black line work, a combination I already played with for my English tea towel. The colour blobs are again ink on yupo paper. And I also sketched a lot of lemons sitting in the sun on our terrace.
The pattern creation process was a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop – livetracing all the line drawings and construct a blue grid in Illustrator and putting it then all together with the yellow blobs in Photoshop.
My finished pattern is called “Lemonade Jazz”:
You can see all the refereshing lemonade patterns on Spoonflower here: http://www.spoonflower.com/contest_voters_temp/new?contest_id=308
And there is loads of them! If you come across mine and like it, I would very much appreciate your vote. Thank you!
It is still really chilly outside for this time of year here in Northern Germany. So this week I would like to bring on the sunshine and summer here on my blog. My painting practice is also all about the feeling of summer and I finished this painting recently:
And yes, there is not even a hint of pink in this painting. Very unusual for my work. And you what I found out today? Yesterday, on June 23, was the National Day of PINK! But it seems that this kind of day is only celebrated in the US, Germany has not heard of such a day (yet). So for now, I’ll stick to blue and yellow and dream a little summer dream of sun, blue skies and solar sailing.
It is the Summer Solstice today and the beginning of summer. After my summery mood and pattern last week, the weather has shifted and we have seen quite a bit of rain this week. So this week’s pattern reflects that:
If this pattern looks kind of familiar to you – I used parts of my Poppy Collage for the pattern, cleaned it up and rearranged it Photoshop. And next week I would love to switch back to summer mode again.