Dreaming on a star

I'm currently enrolled on the amazing surface pattern design course by Rachael Taylor and Beth Nicholls and I wanted to share some of my classmates work.  Its hard being a little designer and I think we need all the help we can get, so I hope this will help them all become a little more well known.

First up is Tina Devins and her Dreaming on a Star surface pattern design website, she graduated with a BA in architectural design but found that her real passion lay in pattern designing.  Which I can’t say I blame her, because pattern designing is wonderful =)

Having found her passion she went on to do Art, Illustration, Printmaking and Surface Pattern, which brings us up to date, so lets take a look at some of her designs.

 Happy Hearts

 Happy Hearts Falling Hearts

 Alice In Wonderland Outline

 Little Red Riding Hood

 Plum Design

 Egg Rhythm Outline

 Geometric Plain

Her style is lovely and quirky with cute characters and she has taken quite a bit of inspiration from fairytales.  Her drawings are very neat and once put into Illustrator they produce a nice crisp graphic style.  Also I love her colour combinations, especially in Plum Design!

The Inspirational Rachael Taylor!

It's been a while since I've posted, I recently graduated and once you’re out of uni it’s strange but you feel as though there is no net beneath you anymore.  You've been thrown out into the world and as a young designer fresh out of university it is extremely daunting!

This post is on the amazingly inspirational Rachael Taylor.  She gave a couple of lectures to my Textile Design group whilst I was at uni and I can still remember the feeling I had after her first talk.  I was filled with excitement and it was the pivotal point in my life where I knew roughly what direction I wanted to go down with my designing.  I went from wondering if I was on the right course and having no idea at all of where I wanted to go to being full of confidence in my work and I can't thank her enough for helping me figure this out.

Her work is bright and bold with beautiful colour combinations and a uniquely quirky style.  She is an inspiration and will continue to be throughout my career, I just hope someday I can make an impact on new designers the way she has on me.

I would also like to add that Rachael’s and Beth Nicholls Surface PatternDesign Course is amazing and for anyone wanting to delve into the world of pattern design it is a perfect place to start!

Beautifully colourful watercolour artists

Well the title is a bit of a mouthful.  These use of colour by these two artists are what drew me to their work, the style is messy and the colours aren't completely blended in parts but thats what makes it intriguing.  Stina Persson's pieces are more simple compared with Silvia Pelissero who adds a lot more detail to the facial features.

I especially love the detail of the eyes and lips in Silvia Pelissero's pieces, the bold use of colours with the bright splashes against the darker shades is also very striking and caught my eye straight away.

Stina Persson's use of pattern in her artwork was what appealed to me most when I first saw her work.

Both of these artists are massively inspiring for my own work, I have barely ever used watercolours, for some reason I could never get them to work out, however I may just give them another go after seeing these pieces.

Stina Persson

Silvia Pelissero

If anyone has any other artists theyve come across that inspires them please share below =)

Last ever uni project!

Well here it is, my final project of my final year of uni.  Its quite nerve wracking to think I'll be designing for the real world from now on.  This (apart from my Lord of the Rings project) has been one of my favorite projects, the style of drawing is a little different to how I have previously designed.  I wanted to try out a different approach to see if I could vary my designs, this style is much quicker to produce and it was a nice change from the controlled drawings which took much longer.  I have designed these patterns for wrapping paper, so the colours are quite bright, take a look and let me know what you think.

Collection One

Collection Two

Butterflies bursting out of a book

While trawling through Pinterest I came across this piece of art which has a lovely back story to it.

Artist David Karcov made this scultpure in memroy of the Rabbi Yossi Raichik who saved many children's lives from the effects of the Chernobyl disaster.  The butterflies represent the 2547 children he helped save.

It is called the 'Book of Life'.

New design work

Sooo it's been a while coming, here's what I've been up to recently, and by recently I mean weeks ago because I spent the past 4 weeks on my dissertation (even though I was supposed to have started it back in September, but ohhh well).  Which I am very happy to say is completely finished and some poor sod (my dissertation tutor) has to read it.  After a lot of celebrating with wine/cider/vodka I'm back on track with my design work, which is the last project I have to do before I graduate. 

No exams, no essays left, only sitting watching tv and drawing to my hearts content, ye life is pretty good right now.  Although there is the nagging in the back of my head that I will have to find a job once this project is done, THAT I am not looking forward too.

Without further ado, heres my project so far =)
The theme is antiques and I've used a much looser style of drawing compared to my last project.  Some are continuous line drawings and although they look quite messy, once they are redrawn into Illustrator they will work a lot better on cards and giftwrap which is what I have decided to design for.

At the moment I'm taking patterns from my drawings and working them up into backgrounds (like the drawing above) I'll hopefully have some to show you in a week or so.  I had a little experiment with colour below, although it's a bit garish the line quality has turned out well, the colour needs working on though.