This week’s Spoonflower design contest is to create a Mod wallpaper design, using only 3 colors (plus black or white optional). When I was a teen, I had one wall of my bedroom papered with an op art design (much like this one by Alberto Biasi), and though I’m not sure it fits in the Modernist Subculture, I decided to go with an op art inspiration for my design.
I started 
by creating a simple grid of circles. Then, using the Adobe Illustrator distort options, I played with different options.
Spoonflower and Robert Kaufman Fabrics are sponsoring a fabric design contest with the theme being “Geek Chic”. As a chemical engineer in a previous life, I have a lot of practical experience with geeky things, so I had tons of design ideas to start with.
I thought I’d do something with chemical symbols, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed like an interesting design. I drew a number of geeky accoutrements, including the ties, test tube, sneaker and glasses below.
Spoonflower’s weekly design contest theme is “Sailing” and I immediately knew I wanted to use the Notan design I wrote about in this post.
That design used 4 different sail boat-inspired patterns (on the left below), combined Nolan-style into the 16 blocks on the right.
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Painted Eggs.
I thought I’d create a bunch of 3-dimensional eggs and ‘paint’ them with some of my other fabric designs.
First, here’s how I created a 3d egg in Adobe Illustrator (version CS5).
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. 
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.
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
Spoonflower’s contest this week is to design a one-yard zigzag cheater quilt.
I immediately thought of the turtle I’ve used in a few other desi
gns. This post shows a Hawaiian design I made using the turtle. I figured it would be a fun motif to use in a zigzag design.
One of the things I love about creating designs to print on fabric is that I can make them much more complex than I could if I were to create a quilt using traditional methods of piecing and appliqueing fabric. Continue reading
We have friends visiting from out of town, and the two middle-school-aged kids like to do art projects. I thought it would be fun to show them how to do repeat patterns using their own drawings. They can use their repeat patterns as wallpaper for their computer or phone screens.
The steps are pretty simple, leaving lots of time and energy for creativity. Continue reading
The latest design contest at Spoonflower is all about geometrics, and creating the design using only two colors (RGB #a7bb7d and #724b64) plus white. I like geometrics, so I thought this would be a fun design to work on, though I never would have picked these two colors on my own.
To get started thinking beyond the basic circles and squares, I looked up Geometric Shapes in Wikipedia, and discovered a bunch of fun shapes, like the Bankoff Circle, the Arbelos and the Asteroid…if they covered these in my High School Geometry class, I must have been asleep that day. Continue reading
A while ago, Spoonflower had a contest to create a Hawaiian ‘cheater’ quilt design, and I wrote about my design here and about the wall quilt I made from the fabric here.
Here’s the original design, using the turtles and flowers of Kauai.
Continue reading
Color On Cloth 