Geckos — and Using Clipping Masks in Illustrator

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Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest.  The theme for this contest is Australian Animals.  So many great options it was hard to pick — kangaroos, wombats, koala bears, emu, platypus, Tasmanian devils…  I googled Australian art and was inspired by the Aboriginal dot paintings.  I thought I’d try a modern take on the dot paintings using kangaroos and geckos.

I’ll go through the technique I used in Adobe Illustrator to create the multicolored animals. gecko-outlines

I started by drawing outlines of a gecko and a kangaroo.  I wanted to keep the outlines pretty simple since there would be a lot of detail inside each animal.

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One Daffodil — A Small Quilt for AAQI

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Daffodils mean the arrival of Spring, but they also always remind me of my father.  Every year he would divide and replant the daffodils forming the border of our yard and the adjacent woods.  Over time there were literally thousands of daffodils which would welcome us each Spring

We’ve had crazy weather in northern Illinois this winter–warm and no snow–and I’m almost surprised the daffodils aren’t already blooming.  I took this photo this weekend (mid-January).  These flowers (I don’t remember what they’re called) are usually one of the early bloomers in Spring.  I’ve noticed that they’ve been trying to bloom since mid-December (which can’t be a good thing).  After a particularly warm, wet few days, the weather turned back to normal for January and the poor flowers are coated in ice.

daffodil-spring-flower-with-ice

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Daylily #3 — A Small Quilt for AAQI

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I just completed another donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has raised over $883,000 for Alzheimer’s research and awareness).

Like many of my recent small quilts, this one started with a photograph.  I took this photo of a daylily in my yard after a rain, so the petals were still damp.

daylily3-photo

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Seasons Greetings

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Happy holidays everyone!  It’s time for our annual recap, and we needed an appropriate theme for the year in which there was an explosion of internet memes.  One favorite was the short-lived Texts from Hillary (be sure to check out the archive).  So, here’s our salute to everything that was fantastic in 2012. Continue reading →

Frosty Flakes

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When I was in 7th grade my science fair project was on snowflakes, and I learned how to capture snowflakes in a plastic solution on glass slides and then photograph them.  My inspiration was Wilson Bentley’s work.  So, when Spoonflower’s weekly contest was to create a snowflake design, I knew I’d have to design something.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any of my snowflake photos any more, so I looked around the web for inspiration.  You can see many more beautiful snow flakes like these at SnowCrystals.com.

frosty-snowflakes

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Snowflakes and Creating a Half-Brick Repeat in Illustrator or Photoshop

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I’ve been working on a snowflake design for another Spoonflower contest.  When I thought I was all done with it, I realized that it would look better as a half-brick repeat rather than a straight repeat.  It took me a while to rework it into a half-brick repeat, so I thought I’d show the basic steps in this post, and then cover the details in another post.

A half-brick repeat is similar to a half-drop repeat which I covered in this post.  The picture below shows the difference between a straight repeat (on the left) where the stars are lined up on top of each other, and a half-brick (on the right) where each row of stars is offset from the rows above and below.

brick-comparison

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Stargazer — A Small Quilt for AAQI

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Each spring the Milwaukee Art Museum has a 4-day exhibit called Art in Bloom which pairs amazing floral arrangements with the museum’s artwork.  We went to the show last spring, and I took tons of photos of the flowers.

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Turtle Tee

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Another week, another Spoonflower design contest.  This one is in partnership with the publishers of the series of books called One-Yard Wonders — sewing books with projects you can make with one yard of fabric.  They’re putting together a new book aimed at projects to make for children.  The contest was to design a girl’s tee shirt with the theme “Under the Sea”, and the winning design will be in the new book.  The pattern for the tee shirt was provided.

With Under the Sea as the theme, I immediately though about doing a version of a Hawaiian shirt, using the turtles that I’ve used in a quilt design and in a chevron pattern for another contest. Continue reading →

Dancing Matisse

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For this week’s fabric design contest Spoonflower partnered with the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University with the theme of designing a textile that would look at home in a Matisse painting.  They included these examples as inspiration.

I’ve always like Matisse’s cutouts and thought I’d try something in that style.  This web site about Matisse has a great overview of his cutouts, and this is what the National Gallery of Art says about the cutouts:

During the last fifteen years of his life, Henri Matisse developed his final artistic triumph by “cutting into color.” The drama, scale, and innovation of Matisse’s rare and fragile papiers coupes (paper cutouts) remain without precedent or parallel. His technique involved the freehand cutting of colored papers into beautiful shapes, which he then pinned loosely to the white studio walls, later adjusting, recutting, combining, and recombining them to his satisfaction. The result created an environment that transcended the boundaries of conventional painting, drawing, and sculpture. Continue reading →