Spoonflower competition, 90's nostalgia

This week has been a busy one for all things non art related. I'm itching to get back to designing some new illustrations and prints, so to start off i did a quick design for the new Spoonflower comp. This only took me half a day of designing, planning and finishing the design but I'm so happy with it! Inspired the the original Tamagotchis, released in the 90's.

Spoonflower competition- After school snacks

It's been awhile since I've entered a Spoonflower competition, the last one i entered was around 6 months ago, ops! I hope to enter at least 1-2 a month as the Illustrator practise is good and hopefully i can make a small amount of money from it whilst having fun. I loved the brief for this one 'After school snacks' and instantly had fun ideas for it! I had fun with the character design and colouring of the design. Had quite a few problems when it came to repeating the pattern, i literally spent hours trying to fix it! I'm glad i kept going though and already have a couple of 'likes' on Spoonflower and lot's on Instagram!

Biscuits and Milk

Spoonflower competition

A few weeks ago I entered a 'Mythical creature plushie pattern' competition run by Spoonflower. This was the first time I've entered, first time making a plushie pattern and first time completing an Illustration on Illustrator! I hugely enjoyed making this and actually enjoyed working in Illustrator (think it's the first time I've not got annoyed with the program!) I decided to design a Sasquatch, was tempted to do down the unicorn route but wanted to do something a little different. I was so happy with how my design came out!

I already have plans to expand on this with screenprinting and new products, I even have a cute Yeti friend. I was also really pleased with the results as i had 152 votes (all from complete strangers as I didn't advertise on social media)  and some really sweet comments and although i didn't get anywhere near the top ten..... it still made me very happy! Especially as it's my first Spoonflower comp. It's also given me a lot more confidence in my work and to push myself more.
You can check out the other entries here, there are so many good ones!

http://blog.spoonflower.com/2015/02/announcing-the-top-10-mythical-creature-plushie-designs.html#more

Tigerprint competition- Christmas pattern

This is my entry for the latest Tigerprint competition of designing a christmas pattern to be used for wrapping paper design. I was inspired by cross stitch design and the handmade.

Tigerprint competition entry

After a week of working on this i have finally finished my entry for the Tigerprint competition.  

I am pleased with my final design BUT........ I'm not really happy with the quality of the design i sent in. I had to work to specific guidelines and as i result i have lost some of the quality of my drawings :( Below is each individual seed packet which i have drawn by hand in black pen and then cleaned up using photoshop. 

I also played around with a few different ideas which was fun. If you look at the website you can see all the other entries and hopefully mine will be uploaded soon!

Black and white Tigerprint competition

As it's been a while since i've worked on a brief and deadline, i decided to enter a competition for practise. I first learned about Tigerprint competitions when i was back in Uni. Every month they release a different brief and you can win the chance to have placement at their company, win $200 and a possibility of your designs being sold in M&S. If you fancy entering yourself or looking at their most current brief, check them out here! http://designcompetition.tigerprint.uk.com/
Here is the brief I'm working on at the moment, i've really enjoyed it so far.

As a stark contrast to last month’s colour competition, we’ve decided to run the popular Black & White pattern competition.

This month we want you to focus on black and white surface pattern. We would like you to design a surface pattern for a male or female recipient that could be used across a range of our everyday products including:

Gift bags, wrapping paper, stationery products or greeting cards.

The brief is open, so get back to basics and think about how the pattern is generated. Explore different techniques and formats, and really experiment with the elements that make up your pattern. Think about how different lines, marks and patterns can be created and applied. Look at fashion and homeware trends for inspiration.

To summarize, we suggest you focus on the following elements in your design:

• Organic pattern
• Floral pattern
• Geometric pattern
• Traditional pattern
• Retro/vintage inspired
• Abstract pattern
• Mark making
• Tips for winning:
  • Stick to a theme
  • 
    
  • Try to make it commercial!
    ready for M&S
  • 
    
  • Make it yours
    send us your original ideas
  • 
    
  • more tips...
    
• What you could win:

and a possible placement!

We are really excited to see what you can produce with a limited colour palette. Remember we strictly want pattern in black and white so this means no shades of grey.

As It's getting warmer outside (Yay! Hurry up summer), I decided to base my design on flowers, gardens and planting seeds. I also thought that many different people like gardening: old, young, male and female, so I'm hoping my design will relate to a wider audience. I'm enjoying woking on this as its nice to be working on an actually brief and a deadline, i haven't had practise with this since uni.