I just looked at my blog and was floored to find that I haven’t updated this whole year! I am in disbelief because in my mind I had updated weekly during #PatternJanuary. I’m in such denial that I’m looking around like “Who deleted my posts?!” The whole month of February I was under a cloud, in a funk, and definitely in a rut. Spring is officially here and I have turned the page and feeling like a spring bear emerging from winter hibernation. Time to get back to it. Time to get back to everything. Thanks to Anika‘s organization and promotion once again, I participated in Pattern January and had a super productive January.
Day 1 was “J is for” and I cut out the days of the month from gelli printed papers. I really like this pattern and would like to scan it and clean it up and possibly put it up on some POD sites for fabric or a phone case or something.
Day 2 hit me. This is real. A whole month of daily practice and I had not been regularly making or creative in the slightest for a month or more. The theme was Citrus and this was all I could come up with and muster. I felt SO RUSTY and recognized it, but pushed through it, rather than throwing the towel in.
Day 3 was Snowman. I was still feeling unsure of myself and ended up searching my flickr images for inspiration. One nice thing about having been uploading images regularly on flickr for an eternity, is that I have an easily accessible library of images to reference. I picked this miniature snowman I made on our front porch when we lived at the duplex and built it in Paper by 53, on my ipad.
Day 4 – Keys. I reminded myself that even though I love the idea of doing super simple and basic patterns, where I am able lay down a couple brush strokes and voila, it’s finished, the truth is, that when I dig in, spend a lot of time and do the hard work, that is when I get really good results. I grabbed a variety of keys and painted them in watercolor. Here is a progress picture of just the keys with their references.
Day 5 Octagon. One thing I love about Pattern January is that everyday I have a new theme and since I work a day job, I am thinking about that theme all day long before I get home to actually work on it. On this day I wanted to take some of my irregular geometric shapes used in my work but as silhouettes, and combine them with the striped watercolor lines, as seen on many of my banners, and stationery. The funny thing about this one was that Anika, ended up doing such a similar pattern, it was awesome!
Day 6 Desert, I was pretty impressed that I came up with this, having never been to the desert in my life
Day 7 Mermaid watercolor, more to come on this pattern hopefully
Day 8 Cut & Paste, pretty straight forward and probably one of my favorites
Day 9 Fan – pen and ink in my sketchbook
Day 10 – Numbers. This one was inspired by alphabet pinback buttons I’ve made for my shop before
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for 2 more parts!
