MIID Summerschool 2016

Every year I participate in a surface design course online with the Make It In Design School in the UK.  It's a great opportunity to get those creative juices flowing and connect with like-minded designers from around the world.  I have met and now follow many talented artists - it's really so inspiring and I look forward to it every year!  If you have an interest in surface design, I highly recommend their courses designed by Rachael Taylor & Beth Kempton - talented ladies with up-to-date industry experience.  It's beneficial to have some Adobe digital software skills already, however the drawing classes are really user/ beginner friendly and encourage you to experiment with making unique marks with all kinds of tools that you can then transfer to digital design.  Once you have a digital design, you can print it on just about anything fabric, paper, ceramic, plastic or timber - the applications are endless and this is one of the reasons I am so passionate about surface design. So stay tuned - at Paprly I'm not just stopping at wrapping paper!

So the two briefs I participated in were in the advanced track: Modern Pop Art and Summer Botanicals.  For the PopArt brief, I was inspired by hot pink lips and those fun two-tone spot textures found in pop art designs.  For the summer botanicals, it was all about tropical leafy greens like fan palms and native firewheel flowers.  The circular fan type patterns in both plants seemed to be the attraction here and made for wonderful radial style motifs.

So now I think I'll just let the following pictures speak for themselves, some sketches followed by the final patterns. 

Modern Pop Art 'Hot Lips'

Summer Botanicals 'Firewheel Fanpalms'