Spoonflower Contest – Pastel Cafe, inspired by the 1950s Italian or French cafe scene, including plants, mugs and teapots and formica furniture.Spoonflower Contest – Bioluminescence, inspired by jellyfish and their underwater surroundings as well as bioluminous plankton.Spoonflower Contest – Quiet Spaces, inspired by how people find their happy quiet space growing plants and being surrounded by them, also inspired by my wish to finally keep a plant alive.
Spoonflower Contest – East Fork, inspired by the East Fork pottery company, with the theme of sunrise I thought about taking their values of connection to make this pattern, representing friendships, relationships and how something as simple as a cup of tea together can help sustain this.Spoonflower Contest – Midsummer Festival, inspired by the Midsummer Festivals celebrated with Maypoles, flower crowns and appreciation of nature.Spoonflower Contest – aromatherapy, inspired by florals traditionally used in aromatherapy.
I take part in these little weekly contest and any others that I come across because it gives me a day off from my regular module work and allows me to do something different. Sticking with the themes they give every week I have drawn things very different from my usual kind of style. Below shows some examples of creating a little collection from the submitted hero design.
^ Spoonflower Contest – Canadian Wildlife, inspired by the arctic hare, beaver and red fox and the various spruce and pine tree forests prominent in the country. I also made some coordinating patterns to go with this because I was enjoying using the motifs.
^Spoonflower Contest – Large Birds, inspired by owls in the UK, maybe not what you would immediately think of as a large bird but when I am more used to seeing robins and woodpeckers in the garden, they are a lot larger than this. I created some more designs using the foliage and birds to go along with the main owl design. I think the blue and pink give a more modern pop of colour to the designs.
^Spoonflower Contest – Ice Cream Truck originally inspired by an ice lolly that has fruit frozen into it. This carried on into colour themed patterns just seeing what colours worked well together, then patterns that just featured the fruit because the glazed ice of the lollies was hiding a lot of the brighter colours and detail there. I was originally going to add ice creams into the first hero design too and draw sprinkles around the bigger motifs, but I thought about doing the lollies that they were enough, and instead took the shape of the seeds and pips and used them to fill the gaps. I wanted to try colours I have not really used before and brightness, I was going to add little faces onto the ice lollies too to make them little cute characters, but I need to spend more time working on something like that, I’ll probably make it a goal to try that, it relates to my graduate collection too, where I played with different eyes to see how it changed the animal.
^Spoonflower Contest – Brightly-Coloured Reptiles, inspired by chameleons and their unusually bright colouring, with a range of coordinating patterns to go along with it.
^Spoonflower Contest – Day at the Lake, inspired by a day fishing in freshwater. A bright little collection using purples, blues and oranges to create an underwater busy fish scene with bubbles. The one uploaded for the contest shows blue and purple fish together on a light blue background.
^Spoonflower Contest – Inspired by the Tropical Surrealism challenge, this collection uses parrots and their feathers, tropical leaves and plants and fruits to build up the motifs.
^Spoonflower Contest – Sports and Leisure, inspired by snorkelling and exploring the oceans, the last design here was submitted for the contest, and the rest were made as coordinating designs in the collection. Showing sharks, seahorses, turtles, jellyfish and a range of coral and shells.