As part of the professional practice module, contests are important to show development into a professional surface pattern designer. Even though I was not taking the module yet this year, I had started looking at some contests before and decided to enter a few now that I have a lot more spare time than I did before.
Contest Entries
I entered the dragonfly and ladybird design as pillows in the Ohh Deer Pillow Fight contest, I think they looked good and it gave me automatic product mock ups as well which was nice to see. I also tried the Spoonflower ‘Pastel Cafe’ contest, inspired by the 50s French and Italian cafe idea.
I have a few more upcoming too which I am pleased about as it gives me some time away from my main module to look into my personal interests in surface pattern design, which is relaxing, especially in a time where we cannot leave the house at the moment.
Producing my own product mock ups has been great to see all my patterns together and how they look together, I think this has definitely helped me to decide what I want to put together for a final collection that Mat wanted, which is a giftbag, a tag, a card, a roll of paper and a flat sheet of paper.
Final Collection
This photo shows my idea for the final collection, with some other photos showing some details, as without the physical products printed due to the circumstances, it may be hard to tell some details. The giftbag is shown here with a side view as well, showing the green background hero design featuring the ladybirds on the front and back of the bag, and the pink squiggle blender as the gusset of bag. I also decided on a complimentary pink ribbon handle, with a ladybird tag attached to it, with dark pink tissue paper inside the bag. The next couple of photos show the card in detail, with the bold design on the front and the inside of the envelope in a small scale printed blender, with the rest of the envelope in a light yellow colour. There is also a white square on the front of the envelope to put the address or name in neatly. The inside of the card has a simple “Happy Birthday!” greeting, with a few decorative leaves in the corners. The large full collection image shows the flat sheet design in the soft white blender, and the roll design is shown here as double sided, so the both sides have a roll each with the corner lifted to show the design on the other side as well.
I also thought about my mini fabric collection, the dragonfly hero I thought would be perfect for this. I made a small makeup pouch, a few re-useable make up pads and a travel wrap to show this in mock ups.
Fabric Mock Ups
These were done quite quickly but I think they will be effective to show the idea of the designs on the products here.
Adding Patterns
So the small make up pouch here is done in the dragonfly hero design, with the three little make up pads each showing a different colourway of the lily pad design, and finally the travel wrap with the yellow secondary lily pad pattern on the outside, and the white blender on the inside. I am not sure whether this all work together as well as they could, so I might look into this again and maybe put a more simple blender on something to make it a little less busy as a collective.
Tahlia Paige 