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

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.

Spoonflower

I've signed up with some of my designs on Spoonflower. You can find my shop here

Kelly_H's designs on Spoonflower

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. 

Fox pattern continued......

I really enjoyed designing the fox pattern but as i spent so much time on the computer i was ready for a hand drawn project. I had intended to complete the final piece by hand so i thought why not just extend the project and complete both computer and hand draw design. I really enjoyed completing this and zoning out for a few hours drawing the small lined detail, its really therapeutic. I used only 5 coloured pencils for the leaf work and this was all drawn by hand, as well as the fox. I decided to complete the frame with plain cut out paper as i liked the contrast of the detailed linework vs plain flat coloured paper. I think this will make a nice print if I scanned in at better quality, which will hopefully be soon. I have plans to buy a new shiny A3 printer/scanner sometime soon........ hurry up pay day!

I'm having a break from this project for the time being, but i do have more plans for it! I already have a walrus repeated pattern sketch (he's so cute!!) and ideas for other characters. Im also think I could use this pattern for a cushion or necklace design and make a whole collection from it.

Fox pattern

I've had this pattern idea in my head for months now and finally got round to adding it to paper. I was inspired by the painted patterns inside the temples I visited in Thailand and wanted to make a more modern pattern with a cute style. This was the first time I've ever tried to design my own pattern and it wasn't easy! It took me way longer than expected  but I struggled through until I was happy with the design.

I started the designing in my sketchbook, with the idea my final piece would be hand drawn. After going round in circles and not getting anywhere I decided to complete the design in Photoshop and Illustrator. Here is the pattern repeated, very pleased with how this came out :)

I have realised that every design and drawing I have done is really taking a long time to complete. I feel so out of practise and really regretting the fact I haven't done much creatively in the last few years. But, I can change that now..........to more work!