New floral sketches and drawings

I've been wanting more practice with textile designs lately, so I spent a chunk of time this week turning my recent floral sketches into patterns.

After scanning my ink drawings, I opened them in Illustrator and used the Live Trace function to turn them into vector art. I then brought all the vector elements into InDesign, mixing and matching one drawing with another, to assemble the designs.

I scanned in pages from West Elm and Crate and Barrel, and I used InDesign's eyedropper tool to create swatches of colors from the images. Then I tested out various background colors for my patterns using these color combos.

Here are some of the final patterns, as mocked up in my Society6 shop:

Crabs, Lace and Mashups

In Lilla Rogers' Make Art That Sells Bootcamp this month, our mini assignment began with drawing two seemingly unrelated subjects: black & white crustaceans and colorful patterns. After spending a week drawing various crabs and lobsters, as well as creating several floral motifs, we were given our main assignment: to "mashup" the two on a plate.

For many of these assignments, drawing helps me understand the proportions of the subject, but for final art, I tend to want to work in collage. With a photo of a rusty Brooklyn manhole and and a scanned watercolor, I created a chunky crab collage. For my pattern, I went with this lace, which also reminds me of a fishing net and a bubbly shoreline.

In the end, it's not a very successful mashup for me. I love the crab, but it clashes with this one-color lace, and it's visually confusing. I will be trying a version with texture in the lace, and also one with less texture in the crab.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome!

My latest MATS poster assignment

Yesterday I completed my April assignment for Lilla Rogers' Make Art That Sells Bootcamp course. We were asked to create a 20x30 poster for her upcoming event, the Global Art Gathering, which is in Brighton on June 12. We were given the MATS color palette to work with, and some required copy, but the rest was pretty open.

The color palette threw me, as I was unable to use textures in a way that I am used to (while maintaining the specified colors). I tried some new techniques in Photoshop to get more texture, but ultimately, I kept it simple and went with this for my submission...

Glazing bowls for the Empty Bowls fundraiser

Although we moved out of Brooklyn almost two years ago, I was thrilled to be able to participate in Bay Ridge's annual Empty Bowls fundraiser again, which is coming up on May 2nd. I didn't make it to the Brooklyn glazing party, but I went to a nearby DIY shop, had these fired there, and just shipped my bowls to the event.

We recently lost an incredibly special little girl in our community, and my son has been frequently asking questions about the afterlife. These questions were on my mind too when I glazed these bowls, and I've tried to incorporate a feeling of expansion and optimism.

Veggies

I'm illustrating an e-cookbook right now for M Delish Boutique, and here are some of the veggies I used to create her Gazpacho page. Mmmmmm... veggies.

Paint pens are kind of fun

I picked up some paint pens for our Easter egg decorating, and I love them. I tried the silver pen on a sloppy watercolor sketch I made a few days ago, and I really like how it added new life to it. I'll be trying this on other potential discards and see what I can create...

Illustrating a cookbook!

I am currently illustrating a cookbook of 12 yummy soups for my longtime friend, Melissa at M Delish Boutique.

We revealed our first page yesterday (sans recipe)...

If you're interested in getting a copy, Melissa is offering a discounted pre-order price for a limited time here. Delish!