Pattern Craze

Well, actually it's not craze for me, it's more of a form of meditation. Drawing patterns is extremely soothing for me and a great way to do something with my hands while planning my next illustration in my head.
Anyways, a little bit each day last week I've started cataloging and digitizing some of the pattern designs I use in my work.

It started by brainstorming with my microns right here:

Now I'm moving on to making them into vectors.
I've decided to sort them by geometrical shapes. Here are the triangular ones:

And I think they pretty neat on iPhone cases and such:

found in my Society6 shop

Update: August 1st, 2012

Square patterns!

Circular Patterns!

Add caption

Merchandise on:

Society 6 
RedBubble

Walnut Tree

About a year ago for one of my illustrations I created an image that was inspired by the song - "Somewhere Only We Know" by Keane. Immediately after finishing the piece I knew that I wanted to do a series with a similar dreamy theme inspired by music.
So, yesterday I finally returned to this idea and completed this little piece. I thought it might be fun to do a few miniature works before doing a few big ones.

This piece is inspired by Keane's song - "Walnut Tree"

Orientation is reversible. It can be flipped this way.

and this way too:)

I drew/painted the image on 6 x 6 inch Strathmore Bristol smooth paper, but the image itself is about 4.75" wide and 2" tall.
Used my trusty 0.05 micron pen + my new 0x4 brush (and bigger brushes too) with ink. The smaller the brush is, the more excited I get!

Here's a cellphone snapshot for scale reference:

a penny for scale

Buckwheat Bread

I made bread for the first time yesterday. I used a recipe for rye bread from "Fat-Free Cooking" by Anne Sheasby (pg 236). I cut the recipe (yield) in half and instead of rye flour I actually used buckwheat flour and I sprinkled oatmeal on top instead of caraway seeds. First of all, I didn't have any rye flour (or caraway seeds) and second of all, I always have this need to change something from almost any recipe.

The bread turned out a little denser than I thought I would be. Maybe its's the buckwheat, maybe I over kneaded it, but I still liked the results.


Happy Friday!
I'm off to bake something else!

Patterned Pottery II

Well, there was a second plate from that ceramics workshop I mentioned in my previous post. We used the mold method to create plates in shapes of flowers, picture frames, or as in my case - a seashell. Unfortunately, when I got this plate back, it wasn't as nice and smooth as when I left it in the shop to be fired in the kiln...It had small bumps and scratches, especially on the bottom side. After being melodramatically grief-stricken (just kidding!) I realized that pattern ornamentation just happened to be the best solution for disguising these imperfections. Just a happy coincidence, which has nothing to do with my detail addiction, of course.

Originally I was going to paint this seashell using red, black, or blue. However I ended up being seduced by some of the promises my craft paints displayed on their packaging. A bottle of Gallery Glass paint proclaimed it would give me a crackled effect if I applied it to another Gallery Glass color. The only other bottle of this brand I had was green - so voila - I ended up with green. Sadly, when I applied the crackle medium, it didn't fulfill it's duty, even though I followed all the directions on the bottle. What a shame! Oh well, you win some, you lose some I guess.=)

Here's what I ended up with though:

My patterned bowl now has a friend!

Patterned Pottery

So, a long time ago a couple of my friends and I went to a ceramics workshop to make and paint plates. Due to my scheduling difficulties I was only able to go and make my pieces, but was unable to paint them. In turn, when I finally had the time recently I painted them at home. Since I don't have a kiln at my disposal, I just decided to use regular acrylic paints and varnishes to decorate. I decided to let my pattern-crazed tendencies to take over the design of this piece, and I'm pretty content with the result.

I'll have to scout out some ceramic acrylic paints later though - because I can absolutely see ceramic plate painting becoming a new hobby!

inside

I wish we didn't have to carve out our names when making our bowls...but oh well

And that's what the bowl is supposed to be used for - as a hat, clearly

One plate piece down, one more to go!