Surface Pattern Design
If you love pattern as much as I do – then here’s your feast.
Enjoy
Inspiring: Barbara Gilhooly {maker/artist}
Barbara Gilhooly's work is seductive in its multilayered colours, its bright patterns and flowers, its hints of mid-century style. And she amazes with her variety of mediums and breadth of skill - painting, printmaking, wire and wood sculpture, just to name a few ......
Inspiring : Emily Julstrom {surface design + illustration}
Emily Julstrom says it's good to get as many terrible ideas off your chest as possible so you can get to something interesting. I think she must have done an awful lot of work, because what I see is utter skill and total clarity of vision. I first came across some of...
Inspiring: Julie Emmerson {surface design}
Based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Julie Emmerson is making her mark in the world of pattern. And just like her location, her patterns are filled with sunshine too - bright colours, simple shapes and warmth. After a long career in graphic design,...
Inspiring: Laura Olivia & the Mekong Delta {surface design}
Laura Olivia has a long-term fascination with Vietnam. So much so that she has designed her latest collection around it - from the floating markets where the locals trade from boat to boat, to the lush tropical flora and fauna of the area - especially around...
Inspiring : Laura Mysak (2 years on) ~ florals with romance
laura mysak - roses "It's funny how sometimes, the thing which daunts you the most is the area that you should be pushing yourself towards." Two years after I first featured Laura Mysak's surface designs, she took a brave step into the unknown world of...
Inspiring : Marijke Arkley {surface design}
Marijke Arkley counts her experiences in the traditional textile workshops of India as one of the most inspiring things she has ever done. Surprisingly then, at first glance her own textile designs sit in remarkable contrast to the intricacy and flamboyance of those...
Inspiring : Elizabeth Halpern {surface design}
One of the biggest struggles for freelancers, as designer Elizabeth Halpern and her freelance photographer husband know well, is the financial uncertainty of being independent artists. As she says, it can be "incredibly stressful at times." But she's been working at...
Inspiring : Sarah York {surface design}
"Hand painted florals are my favorite, as well as research and coming up with new color palettes. Isn't that the most fun part!?" I'm inclined to agree with San Francisco-based surface designer Sarah York on this - looking at pics for hours (aka research ;D ) and...
Inspiring : Lewis Mark Grimes {surface design}
After a high flying career in publishing and launching his own agency, it was not until he was struck down by illness and a prolonged recovery that Lewis Mark Grimes came to surface design. Working solely with molted feathers and designing in digital...
Inspiration : Ashley Lotecki – surface design
After working as an in-house designer for many years, Ashley Lotecki felt that while it had been great experience and creatively challenging, her identity as an artist was completely anonymous. So when a couple of major clients closed down and the company she was...
Inspiring : Claudia Owen surface design (revisited)
I first came across Claudia Owen's work about this time last year (I featured her here), and was attracted to her elegant geometrics with their vivid, clashy colours. Just recently she contacted me again because she has just launched a new shop selling accessories and...
Inspiring: LEMONNI {Annie Chen – surface design}
Annie Chen aka LEMONNI is about to exhibit at her first Surtex - and she's a bit excited about it. If you're a surface designer, Surtex is an enormous opportunity to get your work in front of the people that matter to your business - licencing executives, interior...
Inspiring : Nouveau Bohemian {surface design}
With a "background that is ridiculously unrelated to what I do now", Esther Fallon Lau produces gorgeously diverse patterns, full of whimsical creatures and fairytale people in soft textures and colours. Under the name Nouveau Bohemian, she spreads her designs...
Inspiring : Sarah Bagshaw {surface design}
It was while studying at art college that UK designer Sarah Bagshaw had her first serious encounter with pattern love. It all started when her Mum gave her some patterned 1960s bath towels that she'd had as a child; and Sarah's work abruptly altered direction....
Inspiring : JulesAndInk {Julia Pellizzari}
Julia {aka JulesAndInk} Pellizzari's favourite piece of advice was given to her when she was first venturing out into surface pattern design for herself. "I was reminded that no matter what, always keep moving forward with your passion and what it is you want, each...
Collections of me: Music + pictures 4 : alt-J ~ Hunger of the Pine
Music + pictures {or even more simply, "music pictures"} is a collection of beautiful from around the interwebs while I'm on holidays for January - at the beach, camping, with my family. Have a fab New Year, and I'll be back on the 1st February. {p.s. I've just joined...
The best of 2014
Oh. My. Goodness. There goes another year..... in all its chaotic, mind-bending glory. Disappointments, epiphanies, and serious amounts of hard slog. I'm older and wiser. And clearer on what I need to do. And that's awesomeness right there, even though I didn't...
Inspiring : Frances Boyd {surface design}
It was at the suggestion of a friend that Frances Boyd fell into surface design."She suggested that as I was good at drawing and useless at sewing to delve into the world of surface pattern." After graduating with a degree in Textile Design, Frances had...
Inspiring : Ali Benyon, surface design
"Not all who wander are lost." It's an appropriate quote for Ali Benyon, designer, maker, blogger and author. Originally from the UK, she started her career studying Textile Design at Loughborough University, and emerged 7 years later with a degree in Multi Media...
Surface design + opportunity : Stuart Hungerford
Imagine you're standing at the intersection of visual arts, mathematics and computer programming. What do you see? The framework of endless possibility? Such is the inspiration for Stuart Hungerford. In his day job Stuart works with computers, but...
Inspiring : Cheerful Madness {Nathalie Jean-Bart}
Nathalie Jean-Bart has carved out a career for herself as an animator. But animation wasn't enough and she started searching for other ways to express herself. So about 10 years ago, she started writing stories and illustrating them. But it still wasn't enough...
Icon : Stig Lindberg
Icon: Stig Lindberg Hellooo!!! I can spend hours ogling and sighing over the beauty of things from artists and makers throughout the ages, especially the amazing proliferation of items and artworks since the industrial revolution. So it is with the incredibly talented...
Inspiring : Heleen Van Buul
Looking at Heleen Van Buul's geometric patterns, it may come as no surprise that she originally studied to be an industrial engineer. But she says these patterns are often more inspired by nature than anything else - yes there's symmetry, but there are also...
Design fundamentals: Gestalt (rhymes with Salt)
Well OK OK OK, Gestalt NEARLY rhymes with Salt, but it depends a bit on where you live in the world and who taught you about it. Anyway the question really is, what IS Gestalt and why is it important to design? Gestalt theory came about in the 1920s when a group of...
Inspiring : Renato Crepaldi (part 2)
When I first discovered Renato Crepaldi's marbled papers, I have to say I swooned a little. The colours and patterns are so deliciously seductive that I couldn't resist featuring them on the blog in December last year. The technique of marbling paper is such that no...
Surface design : Hey Tangerine {Caitlin Meara}
I love these large scale repeats by Perth-based designer, Caitlin Meara. There's something about the possibilities of engineering a cut so that it adds meaning to the clothing that makes me just a bit giddy. Yes, I'd like to look like something out of Star Wars. Or...
Repeating Patterns in Illustrator Made Easy: The Pattern Making Tool (CS6 & Newer)
Repeating Patterns : tutorial by Sew Heidi Repeating patterns in Illustrator used to be a very manual process and more than a little bit frustrating. With the introduction of the Pattern Making Tool in CS6 (if you’re in CS5 or earlier, you won’t have access to this...
Surface design : Nicky Ovitt (part 2)
Nicky Ovitt : I having been contemplating some "re-visits" for a while - I love the idea of following someone's career development in real life - to see how their work is progressing, what new ideas they have, to see how they've grown in their business, and to see...
Hot or not : cactus
OK OK OK. Well I reckon that if I've got a Pinterest board called "Love a good succulent", than you can safely assume that hey, I don't mind the odd cactus. The shapes and colours are pretty incredible - I love their chunkiness, their strange shapes and their...
Surface design : Anna London
Anna London is a serial creative, and for a long time had been filling her life with various classes in print making, graphic design and fashion design. It wasn't until she took a course in hand-printed textiles while studying Art Studio and Design in university that...