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Friday, August 15, 2014

Make It In Design Summer School

A few weeks ago I started the online course offered by Make It In Design called Summer School. It's a trend and inspiration brief sent out every two weeks, there are three different tracks and since I'm a very green beginner in the world of surface design I'm taking the beginner track. Our first week was Tropical Paradise.  I was digging pineapples and zeroed in on them. I worked in mixed media using pencil, watercolor pencils and gouache. 

My goal in making the art for this course is creating designs that I would want to wear, have in my home or give as a gift.  I'm not a whiz at mocking things up so I have these in my Society 6 shop and borrowed the photos from there! 

The fun part of the brief is that it's all trendy items and that has inspired me in my day job - making beads and jewelry.  So here is a pineapple bracelet that I made for myself! I had never really thought of myself as a pattern designer, but I realized I make patterns all the time - they are just in clay rather than on paper.  So working in clay first for each assignment has been a fun a way to find inspiration. 

Tiny pineapple charms.

The second brief was on tribal patterns and I wanted to work with color and texture for this design. The feather pattern was inspired by African prints. I wanted to create more of a collection that would work together so I worked up three patterns in the same color palette and graphic line quality. These were created with Copic markers and oil pastels. 

Here are the three designs and products from my Society 6 shop.  You can also get prints of each of these designs there too. I really think I need to order that big on the top for myself!

And to start this assignment I started with the clay and made beads. This design actually inspired the drawings in both color and pattern. I've wanted to create beads that had that a tribal vibe for a while because it's super trendy in the jewelry world right now, so bonus result of the class!

You can see the galleries and read more about the Make It In Design programs on their website here.