Tigerprint female pattern

So last night I submitted designs to Tigerprint's monthly design competition. This months theme is "female surface pattern", the brief being fairly open, asking designers to re-invent female pattern, thinking outside the box and using designs which steer away from the obvious flower designs you see everywhere.

I have been using the Ipad app "IOrnament" a lot recently to draw my own digital designs. It takes a lot of the work out of figuring out repeats and the more I use it, the more I see how much you can do with it. Once you have drawn your pattern, you can see what that drawing looks like in different repeat styles, and you can then Email the tile to yourself to use in Photoshop as a pattern.

For this competition I opened the tiles I wanted in Photoshop and tweaked the colours, saturation etc. before submitting them to the competition!

I have also put some of the designs on Society6 if you fancy a cushion or phone cover, check them out in my shop here. 

Trapezes and monkeys

So, as a few people know, or if you read this post you will know I have been working on a large scale mural for the walls of Plymouths new optometry centre. I am doing 3 walls for the paediatric room which will be digitally put together and then printed onto vinyl! 

When I agreed to do this project I didn't really realise what I let myself in for, it has been a massive learning curve and after  2 months working on it I am nearing the stage where it is ready to be printed-which frankly scares me crapless! Mainly because my drawings being stretched to 3ft tall and however wide is crazy and I just hope to god it looks as good as I want it to be-hard to imagine when editing images on a 13" macbook screen... 

Anyway, I don't want to post too much imagery yet because I want it to be seen all put together, but here are some people doing flying trapeze I did a few weeks ago for you to get the idea-

And this guy chilling in the splits!

The theme ended up being circus-working at camp in the summer I wanted to join in circus so badly. I have massively enjoyed coming up with characters and playing around with drawing different animals! The opening is on the 23rd April I believe so some pictures should be up then-excited!

Happy Easter

Here is one of the drawings I did to show the people at The Great British Card Company last week:

Instead of eating chocolate all day today I am curled up in my grandad jumper doing a combination of dissertation, 100 page report and possibly some circus drawing for the opticians! 

How is everyone elses easters going?

Get Your Commercial Head On

I have spent the past four days doing a work placement at The Great British Card Company in Gloucester. All year I have had people asking what I will do when I finish this summer and the thought terrifies me so this was an opportunity to learn more about the commercial world of illustration and how I can make my work more sale-able!

I spent my time working with In house illustrators Carly and Simon who quickly showed me that I have no clue about what is considered "commercial" by the general public... With their help I managed to create a range of cards with careful consideration about how to make them appealing to the masses whilst also still using my strengths and my own personal style.

It was a definite learning curve, and even if I don't go into this industry I feel a lot more knowledgable about commercial card design and the range of skills used. I also got to play around with the foiling machine and flitter (glitter) to add extra bits to my cards. However cringy and girly it sounds I did love doing it! (and the glitter is still all over me...) 

In the end I managed to make 4 card designs and 6 gift wrap designs, heres a few samples! The balloon is my favourite, hoping to make a couple of cards to go with that one, my eyes started to blur today from too much Photoshop so I didn't get to finish it. 

These both have glitter and foil but it is pretty impossible to photograph well...

Ballooooons!