When I saw the name of this contest, I thought it was one that I might have to skip, as I do not like sports and I could not think of anything beyond different balls or rigid sporting equipment. Then I thought of swimming, which is kind of a sport and also leisurely as a lot of people do it for fun and exercise. The leisure part I think is important, it could be anything from walking a dog to doing yoga, leisure time covers a range of things.
I developed from swimming and thought of snorkelling under the water, where you could interact more with sealife and animals, so I decided to go with this, as it gave me a chance to think about a variety of underwater animals too.
I drew up some girls exploring underwater and used this to show the idea of someone doing the activity, I liked doing this as I do not do a huge amount of people and this gave me a chance to practice, by hiding the faces with their big goggles too, it was great. I surrounded them with sealife, and I think this gives it an interesting and busy look to it. I entered the large bottom one here into the contest.
I created a lot of coordinating designs to go along with this, which I will work on more and repeat to give a better idea of scale.
I created quite a large collection from this and I think I could probably still do more, I played with all the different motifs, experimenting with colourways and scale a lot throughout.
The Day at the Lake contest made me think of cabins, boats and fishing particularly, although a day at the lake for me would probably be walking, photography, spending time with friends, just because I do not know how to fish.
I decided on the theme of fish because I thought I could do quite bright and vibrant with the colour choices and interesting shapes with the actual fish.
Hero Design
The hero design came out quite bright with all the fish swimming in a couple of different directions. I like this, but I think the contrast of the colours make it look more child-like, nothing wrong with that but its not generally the market that I aim for, so I guess I should keep this in mind in the future when I am playing with the brighter colours.
Single Coloured Fish Designs
I tried some designs that used a single colour for the fish in the foreground then a contrasting colour for the background. I actually think that some of the darker colours worked well with this but I found the purple and blue combination to be particularly harmonising.
Blue and Purple Fish Designs
I tried the designs using the blue and purple combination, then tried them with a range of blue, purple and yellow backgrounds for this. I think this is interesting and I actually ended up submitting the blue one for the contest. I think I always think I need to enter the hero design I do for the actual challenge but all these designs do still follow the theme so I think sometimes a slightly simpler design may be the one to go for.
Bubble Blenders
Finally a few blenders here with the bubbles, I think these are quite cute and work well, although again I think the contrast of the yellow turns it into more a child-like design again.
I just finished submitting my entry for the Spoonflower Large Birds contest, from which I also created a little collection of coordinating designs from. I also posted one last week for the Quiet Spaces category too.
I have started to notice now that my designs are getting more engagement as the weeks go on, usually each post doing better than the last which is exciting because it must mean I am refining my style and doing something right. I could go back to the start of them and notice little problems in the first couple of patterns, such as the Pastel Cafe one, was too pastely, it needed some more dark in the design to add more of a colour balance into it, which I did struggle with a little in the foliage coordinating designs from the Large Birds one, I used a lot of dark browns in the birds so the lighter blues and pinks in the actual pattern were good being lighter, but I do wish I had made some a lot darker, as I much more often than not choose a light background for my designs.
Quiet Spaces Entry
I used some similar plant pots for the Pastel Cafe design challenge weeks and weeks ago, so I took some inspiration from them and kind of repurposed them with newer techniques I have learnt on Procreate, such as easily adding pattern and shading to motifs. I originally had a wite background on this design and I think it looked better in the blue, but there is not much white at all in there and something is not quite right with the colour balance I think. I was working hard last week on my sketchbooks and I left this one a little later than usual, but overall I am happy with it as a simple repeat.
The Large Birds contest was one I thought a lot about with the content, I floated some ideas with my friends in a groupchat, penguin, peacock, eagle, all good options but I was not particularly excited about any of them. I started looking in some of the bird books we have around the house, they come in handy when spotting weird birds in the garden and for situations like this. The bird pages have facts about wingspan, sometimes having the birds flying next to other popular ones to compare sizes. This is when I noticed how big the snowy owl actually was, and looking at some of the other species I noticed they were not that much smaller either, such as the long eared and short eared owls, the tawny owls were bigger than I thought, I thought they were tiny!
Anyway, I love owls and how recognisable they are, and very attractive birds that have been on trend before, and just seem to be one of those patterns that does not go out of fashion, but I knew I wanted to go with my more graphic digital painting approach to get some texture and detail into it. I created blue and pink foliage around it because I thought about how my colour palette is usually involving a lot of greens because I use a lot of nature in my work. I actually really like the foliage secondary designs I created, but I do think they do not look like they go perfectly with the owl design by itself. I did try and correct the colour balance using some space filler dots, which I think worked out really well to add more colour in the designs.
The next contest I believe is Ice Cream Truck, so I think for that one I want to try and go really out of the box with my usual colour schemes and try something bold and bright!
I chose to take part in the next Spoonflower contest, called ‘Canadian Wildlife’, so the first step was to do a little research and see what kind of animals and trees I could look at. I thought about moose, bears, they seemed a little obvious, and large animals, so I thought I would look for something smaller, which is where I came around the beaver, red fox and arctic hare. I think they worked well because they all have a slightly different colour to them, and with green forest colours I think it gives a nice little natural colour scheme.
The Hero Design submitted
I submitted this design above, using a mixture of the animals and a lot of trees and foliage as well. I was really enjoying using these animals and motifs though, so I decided to create some designs to go along with it, I think this is a good practice to do just to practice making these families of designs. If I was doing this for a full collection I would have taken more time to do some more motifs, smaller motifs and maybe add a more contrasting colour into it. But working from this one hero is a task in itself to see what different things can come from it.
The Coordinating Patterns
So these show what I was playing with from that main design, and the repeat of it here at the bottom. While I think it is an obvious repeat, I do tend to stick to basic tile repeats for spoonflower as I want it to be easy to see in the tile when people are looking through and voting for designs. I could see this working for stationary or small giftware things like my main collection, I think this has given me some confidence in designing animal motifs that are not really realistic too as I want to be able to show some life and texture to them without them being boring and flat too.
Continuing to enter contests and take a few hours out of my week to do this regularly is helping me expand my work and practice pattern making while I am still in the mark-making stages of my collection.
I have been doing a couple of contests with Spoonflower at the moment, what I enjoy about them is that they give you a theme, and it is often so unique you do not have anything that just happens to fit into it, so I enjoy taking a few hours a week to work towards this. I usually start by taking the theme and mindmapping a little, so for this one I thought of creatures that produce their own light, and thought of jellyfish and plankton, I thought jellyfish would make a really nice pattern.
I decide on a colour scheme, this is sometimes dictated by the contest but was not for this one, but I decided to go with a range of blues for the ocean, and a bright contrasting pink for the jellyfish. I used procreate to make my motifs, and used a couple of tools add light and luminescence to them, such as the light brush tool and the glowing dots.
Tile of Entry
I created this repeating tile for it, I quite like it as it has a range of contrast and bold colours in it. I have now entered this for the contest and will be looking into the upcoming contests to be prepared for them, I would like to enter every week but I did miss last week’s due to working hard on my submission, but the previous two weeks, Pastel Cafe and East Fork, can be seen below.
East Fork and Pastel Cafe Entries
I like that these are testing my skills and making me learn new things, I am trying out new colours and objects I have never drawn before, so I hope to keep this going for my own development.
Tahlia Paige 