Sneaky Peeky...

Well, I'm FINALLY working on some new collections! Took me a while to gather my scattered thoughts and to simply sit myself down, tether myself to my desk with my trusty earphones, and create. I actually put together some simple mood boards, with my rough sketches, doodles, colors that I'm thinking about, and photographs of the look and feel of what I want to accomplish. Geesh, I've really come a long way in this department. Imagine me, I'm planning something, hehe! But honestly, designing a repeating pattern has a lot of elements and nuances to it, if you don't plan it out a bit from the start, it gets overwhelming! And the trick is....to make yours completely different than anything else that's out there! Whew. No easy task, folks.

I completely believe that with a pattern like this, the layout is key! If it doesn't look good and balanced when even in thumbnail size, I'm going to keep working on it until it does. Second of course, is the colorway and the style of how to color (fill, no fill, outline, thicker outline...etc.), do I create custom fills, patterned backgrounds...the list is endless. I usually concentrate on my main pattern first. Once I get that "right" in my head, the companion patterns follow and flow effortlessly.

I did these cute little motifs about a month ago in my "little black book" of doodles. The black folky florals are the ones that I've just digitally drawn, and the lighter layer below is from my sketchbook (I use this as a reference to trace on). Yesterday and today I drew them in Adobe Illustrator in the proper layers so I can add color properly to them later on. When I was finished, I was pretty astonished that the patterns resembled so closely those from my Ukrainian Pysanky eggs, made MORE than a few years ago when my vision was a bit more perky.  I keep these little eggs in a bowl in the living room. It's really funny how certain things stick in your memory. I can't remember people's names that well, but if I've seen a pattern somewhere?? It's stuck in my head!!! :D

These are made from goose eggs, each one took me 5-6 hours average. The process is similar in theory to batik, each line/stroke is painted on with hot wax, from a wax pen, also called a "kistka". The eggs (hollowed out and cleaned) are dipped in a series of dye baths in progressive colors. Wax is applied after each color to basically seal in that color. At the end, the wax is taken off with a candle flame, and et voila, THE REVEAL. Each little one is kind of like a surprise, you never know what you'll get.