Thursday 14 January 2016

Make Art That Sells 1

As promised, here is my first Make Art That Sells (MATS) assignment outcome. 
The brief was to produce a design for bolt fabric under the theme 'vintage kitchen' 
based on observational drawings of pasta and Pyrex style dishes:






This was my first attempt and I took a week to step back from it and re-address it, something wasn't quite right. I did like the icons and the energy of the design - when I made it as a repeat it looked fun - but I felt that overall it was a bit cluttered and too many colours (even though I do like it!) so I decided to make some cut outs and add texture to them using printing ink and scan them in to create a 'mono-printed' effect. I wanted the shapes to be stronger, more refined and their to be delicious textures in the design: 



The colours I was restricted to in the printing inks determined the overall scheme. Although I did mix the colours to a vintage palette which I had previously decided - I wasn't distracted by the millions of possibilities that you have on photoshop or illustrator, which helped me a lot! Here is the final version: 

I particularly like the coordinates at the bottom! I might get it printed on to fabric and whip up a purse or something kitchen-y for my portfolio. Had a great time doing this Make Art That Sells assignment - although I didn't think it would take me as long as it did to complete the first one. Shows that I need to work harder and faster since spending two years writing and researching... but I'm happy with this outcome now and ready to start assignment 2! 

Tuesday 5 January 2016

2015!

Goodbye 2015! Hope you all gave it a good send off and had a good year. For me, looking back, it's been a fine old year. Maybe I'll even look back and call it a vintage year. I completed my PGDIPE (and got a 1st!). It was hard at times, but rewarding to challenge myself academically with reading and writing. I also got FHEA status which is cool. So happy that now all my spare time can be spent making instead of writing assignments. I also ran my first (last? maybe!) marathon this year! I spent a lot of time training and spending so many Saturday nights hydrating and carbing-up and then off I went for a three - four hour run on Sundays. Phew! I completed it at the end of November in beautiful Florence, Italy and it felt AMAZING. 

So, despite all the time I felt had been taken up by pushing myself mentally and physically last year, I was pleasantly surprised that my best nine on instagram was lots of creations!


Lots of plants too. Knitted Cacti, patterns, notebooks. Most of this is available in my etsy shop right now if you fancy having a browse! Foot is on the accelerator this year. One Christmas present I received in 2015 was the Make Art That Sells course by Lilla Rogers which I'm loving! I'll post my creations from that as I make them, but so far it's really inspiring and such a great thing for me to get back into creating and making post-pgdipe and marathon training, which has just taken up all my time. I've been busy still though! Printing new characters to make homewares and new items over the next few months. I will blog about these later on, but here, have a glimpse of a few things to come: