The Smackdown!

The Smackdown! Picnics vs. Teaparties, Poptarts vs. Danish... I'm a picnic & poptart person myself. Be on the lookout for more rivalries coming up!

Fin

At long last, the website is done! Or at least in a finished state. A work is always in progress and I intend to do a few tweaks, but all in all I'm pretty pleased. Hope you like it! visit at :

www.projectplayplay.com

New Patterns

A few new patterns for further development...

Zombie boy & Zombie girl

Tween Angst

Sketches for Discovery Girl Magazine. Embarrassing Moments!!!! So many moments in high school (and college for that matter!) that were just too, too embarrasing! What's your most embarrassing story?

Literary Heroines

Christmas Surface Pattern & Icons

Christmas already? Yes! Tigerprint is having a christmas icon and surface pattern competition. I think these will be my entries, though I still have a few days to finesse. Have any favorites or least favorites? Now to start thinking about my Halloween Costume...

In Tandem - A new pattern

Pattern 1

Pattern Detail

product design slideshow

Enjoy a pattern slideshow why don't you!

An Inspiring long weekend

Some reworked drawings from the Thursday night Life drawing session at the Society of Illustrators at 128 63rd street in New York. Thank you Julia for a very inspiring weekend. What a great hang out for artists. The drawing room also serves as a dining room and bar. The set menu included a leg of lamb, kale, couscous and pumpkin pie. The rich wood, old fashioned bar and framed art make it a great space conducive to being creative. Lots of fun! Session are Tuesday night from 6:30 to about 9:30 and cost $15 for drawing (with live nude and semi clothed models) or $10 if you're planning on having a drink at the bar, $7 if you're still a student with i.d.

Wild West Pattern

Yeehaw! A new Western pattern. I've always liked Southwestern colors,warm salmons and siennas, cool blues and turqs. This is a slightly updated palette, using an icy blue ground with pale green that I like to call "glow worm". Giddyup!

mani pedi pillows

Pillows were super major at the Atlanta gift show last July. Like all fun trends its important to keep things updated and fresh. Prints were huge, oversized single icons, sea life, naturalist, almost scientific drawings of flowers, animals and birds. When something is good people catch on quickly and the market often becomes saturated with copycat products. This year I'm feeling shaped pillows with embellishments coming on-hence my mani and pedi pillows. Everyone loves a fresh mani and pedi embellished with classy rhinestones. (maybe even personalized with initials?) I need to make a few prototypes and enlist the help of my talented friend from juliaramseyknitwear.com I think these might also make fun winter gloves and socks!!

Fawn pattern / Flower Pattern

New pattern using a fawn, pigeon, frog, snake and pheasant. I keep meaning to design for summer 2012, but it just comes out kind of everyday. Colors are fun though. I was really sticking the palette you seen in this last pattern with just the flowers, but I thought the forest animals needed a little unexpected punch.

old becomes new & Bob the muse

I told you I would use that old palette. I think its really fresh and I don't know that I would have just been able to pluck those colors out of a pantone book, though I did get them from my old painting-so maybe I would have. In case you didn't gather I am a real sucker for color. It is the single most important element of design as far as I'm concerned (assuming were talking about two dimensional art) I recall choosing colors as a past time when I was younger. I loved the 99 crayola crayons with the sharpener in the back! I liked to sort them into groups that complemented each other, loads of fun. I'm also a sucker for names of colors. I like the sound of tangerine over orange, lavender instead of light purple, I like prussian blue and azure, malachite, burnt sienna, topaz, amber...I would love to name colors for makeup or clothes. I like the sound of Lake (very L.L. Bean) If I could name a lipstick it might be jam&toast or something cute!

An old painting from my RISD days

I unearthed this scan of a painting I did my junior year at RISD. Its a lot of layers of gesso, wax, pen, and paint. This is how I worked for the longest time! Often I didn't really have anything in mind when I began. I trained traditionally as an illustrator, beginning in high school learning to draw with Isabelle Torroella a form fashion designer with Christian Dior. In college I took loads of figure drawing classes, painting and printmaking and later years of sculpture with Susan Luery, a contemporary sculptor and instructor at the South Shore Art Center in Cohasset, MA. It wasn't until well after I graduated that I began using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and it wasn't until I started designing product for Dennis East that I truly learned how to use the software. Really it is my traditional training as an illustrator and fine artist that informs all of my work and I am most appreciative of this. I'll probably create some patterns now using this color palette. it's nice to sometimes look back at things and become inspired all over again, instead of feeling embarrassed about old work which is often the case.

Patterns and Illustration

The Daydream Pattern with pink ground
The Daydream Pattern with canary yellow ground ground
Bird Still Life on canary yellow ground
The Swimmers, ( evolved from the Daydream)

The Daydream

This morning I awoke early with images and colors dancing in my head. It was blustery and still a little dark out but I was eager to get started. Donning my winter slippers and with french roast in hand I began the Daydream. When a color palette is working one fun idea can give way to lots more and doodles evolve into finished pieces and patterns. The first image created was the still life bird perched on top of a cage. A flower, some spectacles and a steaming cup of coffee completed the still life. The daydream element evolved from the tree, I think...I imagined a girl falling into a deep sleep under the tree. Anyways, I'm definitely enjoying this color palette and the use of the white. More to come for sure.

Halloween is coming

Illustration created for Coultercurated.com

It is October first, the beginning of Halloween Season and one of my all time favorite months! These are the days that I like to ride my bike through the old cemeteries near my house and look at the creepy old Puritan headstones. I think I may base some Halloween Art around the carved angels and skulls. Much more Halloween to come, including costume ideas...

mustachioed - A short poem detail

Mustachioed - A short poem

A short poem I wrote and illustrated, inspired by Shel Silverstein and a little Roald Dahl. As a kid and still as an adult I really like the thought provoking and often unsettling nature of these poems and stories. They remind me of the sublime. From Wikkipedia: In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis "sloping up to the lintel, uplifted, high, lofty, elevated, exalted") is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. The idea of the sublime really took hold during the Gothic era and inspired great debate about art vs. nature and beauty (art) vs. greatness (nature.) The sublime can also refer to "unlimited" and "spacious" qualities. I think this is why these stories and poems make me think of the Sublime- because they open my mind up and it seems to become so expansive that it just keeps going and going. It fills me with a sense of awe, but also an unsettling strangeness I have trouble describing -like a fleeting instance of clarity that feels shocking and mysterious...