Moyo magazine feature

Moyo is a quarterly online magazine dedicated to surface pattern design. It's full of interviews, design briefs, colour challenges, art reviews, student showcases, design tips, inspiration and trends. And I was lucky enough to get two little features in the 4th issue. My grasses were in the yellow colour stories and four of my patterns were on the showcase pages. I really love this magazine and look forward to each issue coming out. In fact I think the next one is due out the end of this month. If you've not yet seen these magazines go take a look here for loads of inspiration.

Print and pattern design blog feature

Trying to catch up logging my features here on my blog. Since I started my surface pattern design journey it has been a dream to see my patterns on the Print and Pattern design blog and I was ecstatic to discover them featured back in June.

Happy new year

Happy new year! Well the children are back in school after having a lovely Christmas break which means I can get back to working regular hours. The only thing about having a break from work is that I have more time to think up new ideas and give myself even more work to do. I'm currently in the middle of designing a new collection of wedding stationery ready for spring, I'm refreshing the look of my website and continuing my journey of surface pattern design with the final module starting next week. I've learnt so much on this course and met so many inspiring designers. Here's a peek at some designs from my latest 'winter berries' collection.

 

Surface pattern course {1950s trend}

My surface pattern course is now on a break before module 3 starts in January. I've still got lots of information to take in and exercises to complete for module 2 - hoping to find some time to indulge over the Christmas break. Here's a snippet of what I've been up to on my course. This was a moodboard I put together for predicting trends, and below that image, the patterns I created inspired by my moodboard.

Pattern love {Ikea}

Some inspiring patterns snapped on a recent trip to Ikea.

Pattern love {moodboard}

As part of my new journey into the world surface pattern I'm going to be sharing my love of patterns here on my blog, and for this first post I'd like to show the pattern love moodboard I created for my surface pattern ecourse. I spent quite some time putting this together, pinning tons of images over on Pinterest then selecting only the patterns I'm drawn to to help discover my own style.

From sketches to finished pattern

We've just come to the end of the first module of the art and business of surface pattern design ecourse and I'm already looking forward to starting module 2 in November. Module 1 was all about finding inspiration, mark making, creating motifs, understanding pattern design, homing in on our own style, colour choices plus loads more. I've loved every minute of this course and have met (virtually) so many lovely inspiring people from all over the world. One of the things I've enjoyed most is turning my own sketches into patterns so I thought I'd share a few pictures showing the stages from scanning my original drawings through to a completed pattern.

Scanned motifs from my sketchbook.

This is a physical box repeat tile I created by printing my motifs in varying scale and doing lots of measurements to ensure the correct positions to work as a repeating pattern.

Which I later scanned to check it worked... and to my astonishment it did!  I discovered playing around with cut out motifs and re-positioning them is a great way to come up with new pattern combinations.

A couple more weeks into my course we started looking at colour and various ways to come up with new  colour palettes. I chose a colour combination of navy blue, mustard and greys for my motifs, and digitally coloured them.

After playing around with positioning and scale here's my finished placement pattern.

Seedheads notebook

In need of a new design for my notebooks I set to work and doodled this seedhead design which looks great grouped together to make a surface pattern.

My new seedheads design has been digitally printed onto teal or purple card with black pigment ink and filled with 20 pages of crisp white paper to create a cute A6 notebook. Will be available in my Folksy shop soon.