a midsummer night's dream

 Sometimes I find creating with no boundaries to be very difficult...  Which is why having weekly design challenges on Spoonflower is a great idea!  I am sure many designers find the direction and restrictions actually quite pleasing to work in.  Last week's Challenge was a design based on Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (which I read in high school, btw!  ... well it was mandatory!) Not only was there a theme, but this week there was also a restricted palette imposed on all designs:

I was like...  Easy shmeezy!!  But as I started working on it, I found the colors to be difficult to proportion correctly.  Anyway, this is what I ended up with, using all the four colors, plus white:

Midsummer flowers by MAJA Studio

Overall pretty satisfied, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many people took the time to comment and favorite my piece!!  What a great community Spoonflower is!  The other entries are quite impressive...  I think voting ends tomorrow, and the next round theme is CITRUS.  I'll post soon about how my citrus design adventure has ended  :o  Turns out citrus was a fun starting point, but ended up totally elsewhere!

v o t e s !

Well the time has come to vote!  I am seeing for the first time my collection printed on actual fabric.  While I must say I am very pleased with the colour, I am not so sure about the scale of my patterns...  I wish I had scaled down the design of the bottom-middle design, I feel that everything is a bit large for this kind of close-up photography.  I imagined my designs on upholstered pieces more than on quilts, thus the scale, but for the purpose of this contest, I wish I had forseen they way they would be presented...  Alas, what is done is done! Who knows... I might be pleasantly surprised by winning!  One can dream... ;)

Vote here

My collection Fabric8 Genius

the eight final collections

Congratulations to the seven other designers, your collections are looking gooooood!

Spoonflower

I am having a splendid adventure on the website Spoonflower these days...  A few weeks back I entered their weekly design contest on the theme GEEK CHIC and presented this design.  I made it to the semi-finals (top 100) and after the voting round, I was in the top 8 finalists!!

mathematical tension, my original design for the competition

I have been creating new coordinating designs for the final round for a little over two weeks now.  I am pretty happy with my overall collection, considering I am rather new at this!  My background as a commercial artist is really coming in handy in terms of colouration and scale and overall composition.  Turns out I can manage pretty good with this digital stuff!!  These were all done using Photoshop CS6 and my Wacom tablet.  The voting round begins June 6th (this thursday!!)  

dots & numbers coordinating fabric, Fabric8 Geek Chic collection

problems to solve coordinating fabric, Fabric8 Geek Chic collection

know your angles coordinating fabric, Fabric8 Geek Chic collection

Here are some of the other designs I made:  Some of them will be available for purchase at Spoonflower once the contest is over:

The winner of this contest will score a licensing contract with Robert Kaufman fabrics, a 1000$ advance on royalties and a huge Wacom tablet.  NOT BAD ;)  Last year's winner Andie Hanna seems to be doing pretty well, her collection launched this spring and looks fantastic!

My fingers are crossed xxxxx