Those, and the fact that she sees patterns everywhere she looks. “I once had a great assignment in a textile class to spend the week photographing everywhere that I saw pattern. We each got up and shared slides of our findings.  I started with photos of condensing water droplets on the lid of my slow cooker (polka dots) and chopped zucchini lined up on my cutting board (stripes.) Those kind of made sense to people. I ended with a photo of my dog’s face in the middle of a field of beige dead grass – I saw polka dots in a field of stripes. After a few moments of silence, someone asked how in the world I saw that. It was because I was automatically repeating his face all over like dots and the dead grass was like the textured linen background of stripes.  I wish I had time to draw all of the things in my head.”

Katrina utilises a palette of fresh, soft pastels to create a variety of florals, geometrics, vectors and children’s prints. Her swirls and spotty shapes in designs like Doodly Oranges are wonderful – they remind me of a deconstructed paisley.

 

 

 

She nearly always starts out with pencil and paper, and formulates the colour palette in her head while she is refining the drawing. Gouache is one of her favourite ways of testing colour, and she usually mixes 6-8 colours in little cups before choosing. She usually doesn’t consider the repeat too deeply when she’s at this stage, but prefers to concentrate on getting the single image right.  “I’ll paint enough of something to get started and fill in holes on the computer later.”

Katrina has got a bunch of favourite methods to get the result she is after on the computer. “I’ll scan the painting at 300dpi and start working on it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. I have a dozen ways of erasing the paper background from the painting, and I’ll switch around until it’s all gone. I like to erase the paper on a 50% gray background to easily see the white spots. My favorite tip for making sure all of the background is erased is to add a 3 point stroke effect to the layer, which will easily highlight any lines that need to be smoothed out, or stray pixels. Then I put the motif into a repeat, use the lasso tool to pull out painted details to fill any holes, and add a background color.”

 

 

Trying to figure out “what purpose my crafting and designing serves in my life” is a tough point for her. It has been a continual struggle to decide whether to keep doing it for fun, or to focus on making a name for herself as a professional – especially as she has been employed as a pattern designer since graduating with a textile degree in 2008. “Coming home and designing more patterns for myself didn’t seem necessary.  But my husband has been so supportive and is always encouraging me to work on my own art any time I can – he’s really the one who gets me to enter the weekly contests, update my website, and keep my personal work going.”

 

“And now that I’m doing freelance work to stay home with my 9 month old baby girl, I’ve actually felt a new drive to use any free time I have to be creative.”

 

“So, maybe I can’t even say I’ve overcome this difficulty yet – it’s in progress.”

 

 

“Working for Dena Fishbein of Dena Designs has been a huge inspiration. Getting to see how a famous designer works first hand is invaluable – and she’s so humble and open to teaching. I feel so lucky to have had an amazing job with her for the last 5 years. I know it’s not exactly luck and hard work had a lot to do with it  – like putting together a portfolio from scratch in two days during finals! Dena was so patient with me in the beginning when I was still learning everything. You think you know how to make patterns after doing it a few times in college, but that’s nothing compared to what you actually have to do in a designer’s studio. The real icing on the cake moment was in my first year there. They had a branding expert come for the day, and I got to sit in on the meeting. It was like going to grad school in one afternoon!”

 

 

Her best advice? “It’s often repeated, but I think the advice of staying true to your own style is so important, especially with the internet and it being so easy to emulate other designs. When you’re pushing yourself to create work that isn’t true to who you are, it’s going to show through and something is going to look off. The more you can hone in on what makes your style unique, the more people will find something that resonates about it.”

You can find more of Katrina’s work on her own website, www.katrinazerilli.com, and in her Spoonflower shop, katrinazerilli.