Easy Does it...

The word for 2009 is balance. After a mad, hectic, crazy, stressful and exhausting 2008 this year is about going with the flow and enjoying my work and my home life. If I've made any resolutions this year it's to learn to say no; to not commit myself to everything that comes along and to focus on what is really important and do it well. I have clear goals and anything else is just a distraction. So there! Let's see how long it lasts. With the recession taking hold it's time to take things seriously so since Christmas I have been reorganising myself, looking at what I want to do and how I can make it happen which has meant a clear out of surplus stock and going back to basics. Feels good. I am slowly building up a library of patterns and am going to have fun turning them into different things for the shop. What are your plans for 2009? Hope it brings everything you wish for and more!

AEM day 29

We are on a roll with this Christmas thing, been drawing up new patterns specifically for a few of the designs I have in mind and it has occured to me to make them transparent so I can layer them up and change the backround colour to suit, as in this bauble card. The process is starting to feel a bit more normal now and I am excited by the ideas that are springing up in the back of my mind to have a go at next year! We Make is a week away now, will I get everything done I wanted done? I think I might just manage it :D

AEM day 25, 26

My we have been busy, still ploughing through the books and trying to come up with little things that should sell well even if the bigger things don't, so today I printed out these loads of bookmarks - seeing my patterns altogether felt quite satisfying!

AEM day 23, 24

I've always loved daisychains, remember my mum making them when we were little, so I thought it would be nice to do a pattern based on one. Turned out to be a bit of a struggle to get the repeat to work, or rather to get my head round what to do, and then to remember the steps in illustrator. Got there in the end though, after 20 minutes of hair pulling and a few choice words. Technology is wonderful but can be incredibly frustrating at times!

Scuppered! AEM day 3 / 4 /5

Sob my camera has died! Not that we have had any decent light to photograph anyway but I could have shown you poorly lit photos of christmas cards and books and new gift tags. Oh well, here is my new pattern fresh out of Illustrator - hand drawn snowflakes scanned and coloured and after a bit of trial and error and head scratching turned into a bona fide pattern repeat (unlike the previous ones which were engineered into boxes but shh don't tell!)

If I catch a bit of sunlight tomorrow I will try with my mobile phone camera. Have a good bonfire night if you are in the UK!

On a Roll

New!

I've been so busy doing computer based work just lately I haven't had chance to 'make' anything and I have been getting serious withdrawal symptoms. So spent a glorious afternoon (really, complete with sunshine) making this book. It's my first 100% original design - the fabric design on the cover you may recognise from earlier posts - and I am really pleased with it. I am keeping this one for myself but I am working on more which will appear in my shop over the next few weeks.

Illustrator

Last year I was given a copy of Adobe's Illustrator CS3 for my birthday and it has taken me nearly a year to find time to even look at it properly let alone how to figure out how to use it. But a couple of weeks ago I stayed up extra late after the kidlets had gone to bed to tackle it. The first attempt was the little birdy above - looks simple enough but it took the best part of two hours and I wasn't sure I knew how I did it!

Next I tried the cake. These, by the way, are card ideas I scanned straight out of my sketchbook, used the trace feature in Illustrator to redraw the lines (I love that bit) then filled with patterns I imported as jpegs. Hence the complication - too many steps to learn in one go!

The drawing for this last one was too broken and sketchy (as I found out after playing around with it for over an hour) so I redrew it by hand and tried again. I actually think I prefer the sketchier look of the first two pics but at least I am working out how the program works and what it'll do for me. The next step is to learn how to create my own patterns in Ilustrator, very exciting!

New Card Design

It's not finished but this is what I designed the pattern below for. I'm not naturally good at cartoony styles but I've been drawing this little girl in various forms for months now and I think I'm getting a style I'm comfortable with. Drawing the hands and face have been the biggest challenge! The one line drawing excercises have done a lot to help by removing my need to draw what I know them to look like, let the drawing work on its own merit. Does that make sense? Probably not but I've got a head full of cotton wool. Time to watch some trashy tv and chill.

Flower Power

Pattern heaven

I've loved patterns from an early age. Mum would by those mathematic pattern books that were big in the 70's (I've since discovered the science museum still makes them) and I would sit and colour them in for hours and hours - clever mum, anything to get me from under her feet! At college I even considered textile and fashion as a career path but my other love of books and lettering won over and I chose graphic design and illustration instead. I still bought a load of pattern source books which have proved useful here and there but now that I have finally figured out how to create patterns on my computer they are coming into their own and are the main source of inspiration for my new wedding designs. No more being at the mercy of suppliers who decide to stop stocking a line of paper half way through an order and I can guarantee mine are 100% original! By the way did I tell you I was a contol freak?

New Wedding Designs

Here's a sneaky peak at one of the new wedding designs I was working on yesterday. I'd got into a bit of a slump with the wedding designs last year, didn't like what I was doing but couldn't come up with anything new that was 'mine'. So I've started again this time with a bit more enthusiasm and inspiration; there's more emphasis on drawing and I'm designing my own patterns, basically I'm concentrating the things I like and enjoy doing and am good at. Calligraphy and type are back in with vengence this year, something I've always loved even when it wasn't fashionable so that has spurred me on to experiment with those in a new way too.