Pantone's Pinterest Colour Competition

Today's post is all about colour.  Pantone is currently running a lovely little Pinterest competition, they posted the image below and the idea is to choose one out of the ten spring 2013 colours. 

A board on Pinterest full of one particular colour is extremely effective.  Using Pinterest is a brilliant way to build up boards of different colour palettes, you can see how colours work together and they are much easier to see how they would be incorporated into one of your designs.  It’s also a fantastic way of collecting inspirational ideas.  I personally love to sew and make so have collected tons of ideas…which I will eventually get around to doing.

Below you can see my board for the Pantone competition, and below that a few other examples of a couple of the other colours, don’t you agree they look pretty effective? =)

 Meg Berry's Linen Board

 MixedMedia Jewel's Violet Board

A designer feature about me?!

I've been featured on a lovely blog by Dreaming on a star who I wrote about yesterday which you can view here

I just want to say a huge thank you for the feature to Tina Devins of Dreaming on a star, I have had my work featured on a blog once before, but her kind and encouraging words really do make you feel more confident in yourself and your work.  So thank you!

You can see this blog post here =)

Harper & the Owl

Todays post is another of my lovely coursemates, Harper & the Owl, her style is lovely and simplistic, it truly shows how a simple design in only a couple of colours can be extremely effective.  I just want to snap these gorgeous crockery pieces up as fast as I can!

Emiko Hulme, the designer behind these wonderful pieces, has her pottery made by a small family pottery business in Cheshire and then hand decorates them herself.  Her use of blank canvas (as in white space on the pottery pieces) is brilliant, she doesn't feel the need to fill the whole area and instead gives us little snippets of motifs, making the overall designs crisp and uncluttered.

My favourite is the first bowl and mug set below, I love the abstract shapes she has designed and the differing thickness of line makes it quite eye catching.

Also the little birds are so cute pottering across the bowl! =)

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