MIID summer school, beginner track: beginings

I’ve joined the “Make it in design Summer School beginner track”. Mainly because I would really love to take some of the other online courses from them or from Lilla Rogerts, but I just don’t have the money for it, and this one was free. I also want to try out an online course, before I pay money for it. All of my experiences with taking any kind of on-line classes (mostly from coursera) were the same: at first, I was super enthusiastic about it and did all of my homework, but then I lost interest and just forgot about them. So I guess this is like a nice test drive to see how I’ll function in the situation.

Anyway, the first brief is out and we have to design a pattern centred around the theme “Tropical paradise”. The most tropical place, which, incidentally is also the place most resembling paradise I’ve ever been to is the lovely Portuguese island Madeira. When I was way younger, we would go there for our summer holidays with my family, 5 summers in a row. I loved it. LOVED LOVED LOVED it. Thus, my image of a tropical paradise is slightly different from the one suggested in the brief. I don’t associate it with palm trees and I certainly don’t associate it with pink plastic flamingos. I’ve never seen any of those in real life anyway. For me, a tropical paradise is full of streliza flowers, the smell of passion fruit and sand as black as the night.

 

 

I’ve obviously never made a mood board in my life (yes, I do need some actual education regarding surface pattern design:)) and I think this is probably not really a mood board, but anyway, here’s my first collage of pictures that serve me as my first inspiration. It’s also where I’ll get my colour pallet from.

ps, I don’t know thw rules of mood boarding, but heres where I got the photos from:

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/plantasyflores/4443535978/
http://madaboutplants.com.au/Strelitzia-reginae-Bird-of-Paradise-
http://www.authenticadventures.co.uk/destinations/portugal/madeira.aspx
http://kelliesfoodtoglow.com/2012/03/23/green-tea-lime-and-passionfruit-polenta-cake-with-passionfruit-curd/
https://www.buyfruit.com.au/passionfruit
http://www.pbase.com/nella/image/145434790

Anti valentines day design

I like valentines day. If i could have it my way, I would probably decorate the house with hearts and bake cupcakes and be cheesy and stuff, but my darling Norb just doesn’t care for it.  He still doesn’t even know the date of it and I really don’t want to force him into all the sweetness, so we’re not really celebrating it. (He bought me a flower once. After I teased him about valentines day for about a month. It was a lovely orchid. It died, becosue I don’t know how to take care of orchids.)

But I like Valentines day, in general, so this week’s Spoonflower contest wasn’t that easy for me. Anti valentines day… I remember being a bitter teenager and hating it, but that’s not inspirational enough for me to design something around it. But then I though of all the times my heart was broken and all the hearts I broke before settling down. I also remembered all of the excuses that I used and were used on me, the ones that you make when you don’t want to hurt someone, but are just incredibly pathetic. So I decided I’ll make some into typographic cross stitches. I thought I’ll make a few more, but just ran out of time, these thing take forever to make. First you have to design the layout and then find the appropriate typographies and then transform the whole thing into crosses. I bet there’s an app that makes that automatically, but I made it all by hand. Photoshop, a grid of 0.5 cm and a “cross stitch” brush were my solution. It took ages, so at the end, I only made 4 designs. I also made a background pattern out of all the decorative borders I used in the designs (and a few more), to connect them together. That one could use quite a bit more work, but I ran out of time…

Here’s a “close up”, so you can see it’s actual crosses.

I also opened a store on society6, why not? Some of my designs could also works as art prints and tote bags and whatnot, and posting them there as well as on Spoonflower doesn’t really take that much time… Maybe someone wants to break someone’s heart with a cheesy cross stitch tote bag this year, who knows?

Again, as always, if you like my design,please go to spoonflower and vote for it:) There’s quite a lot of funny designs this week, so looking through them is really enjoyable:)

 

Put a bird on it

I’ve been drawing a lot of tits lately. Tit birds, that is.  2 years ago I designed some fabric with cardinals for a craftster swap and I think it’s still my favourite fabric design I ever did. I liked it so much, I’ve decided a long time ago I’m gonna do a collection out of it. 4 fabric designs, featuring 4 kinds of birds in seasonal backgrounds. The cardinals are for spring (although they are probably more often connected with Christmas, but I have never seen one before that swap so I did know). I let the idea sit for a while (khm, lzay,khm), but the next design I tackled was winter, and for me the perfect winter bird is the tit bird. ( I had no idea they were called that in English untill I started googling inspirational pictures 2 weeks ago:)). And since the spoonflower 2014 tea towel calendar design was coming up, I decided to do a tit calendar. Tits. Tihih.

I really like it and all of my relatives are probably gonna get one for Christmas this year. That’s why one of the branches is subtly pointing towards my birthday in March:)

If you like it too, it would be sooo awesome if you could go to this link and vote for me? There’s lots of designs this week, so be prepared for some clicking:). And to see some great ideas, of-course.

(I would also appreciate any kind of helpful comments:))