Friday 19 December 2014

Merry Christmas!

A few Christmassy designs. Robins and that.

Looking forward to seeing family and friends in the deep South and hoping to sneak off a bit and do some drawing and photography in preparation for upcoming module 2 of ABSPD and Lilla Rogers Bootcamp in January. Eek! 'Bitten off more that I can chew' springs to mind! Will be glued to my chair and computer EVEN more than I am already...if that's possible. I might seize up with the lack of movement, but it'll be happy seizing.

Merry Christmas!













Monday 15 December 2014

'Twas the week before Christmas

In between work and life I have tried to keep up drawing and painting/pastels as much as I can - all flowers at the moment.

Wanted to try and retain some of an original artwork, particularly the pencil lines in a finished pattern. As I still haven't given any time to learn Photoshop, I thought I'd use the jpeg of the scanned original in illustrator, cutting it up and repeating it again and AGAIN and adding illustrator vectors. Wanted a slightly haphazard, collage-y look. It all went well, until I tried to save the illustrator file. It did save, eventually...but then everything crashed. Tried re-opening it twice and crashed again. Aaghhh!!! Just couldn't re-open it and thought I had lost it for good. My partner Steve came to the rescue and took the file onto his mac (more memory) and managed to open it and save a jpeg. Wahoo! All not lost!

So that's what happens when your Illustrator files are too big because you can't be arsed to learn new software.

Here's the offending pattern, plus another one I worked on today.


Monday 8 December 2014

The First Post

Hello. Having recently taken Module 1 of The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design course, I have decided to take the plunge and start a blog to record my progress, from here to... hopefully having a pattern licensed, which would be amazing.

Having worked as a freelance artworker for about 8 years, I have always had it in the back of my mind to be a pattern designer. The ABSPD course has given me the kick up the ass I needed to finally start that journey. There were two particular assignments that have had a huge impact - picking up a camera for inspiration and drawing from life again for the first time in years. Takes me back to my art school days and the things I loved to do most - the research and development of a piece of artwork. So I am going to continue with this as I head towards Module 2 of the course and will use this as a platform to post snippets of photos, drawings, prints, collage and whatever else develops along the way to making final patterns.

There has been alot of talk amongst the ABSPD Module 1 class, regarding finding a 'style'. I still have no idea what my 'style' is as I have produced quite varied patterns so far on the course. I'm hoping this blog will help in the emergence of a 'signature style' which I can confidently present to potential clients. I have decided not to use my own name as a brand (at least at the moment), but am using 'Theano' which is my daughter's middle name (named after the wife of Pythagorus, who amongst other things, proposed the idea of the Golden Section) as a 'studio' name to work under. At the moment I am holding off designing a website for 'Theano' while I am still developing a style.

So...anyway, here are a few of my favourite patterns designed on Module 1 of the ABSPD course: