Street Art

This week's contest was for a design that had to do with graffiti or "street art." I'm usually more inspired by somewhat punny twists, so I decided to take "street art" in a different direction. First, I came up with the thought of creating a street map, where all the little roads and markers and things came together to form a recognizable work of art, like the scene on the Sistine Chapel ceiling where Yahweh is pointing the spark of life at Adam. I had some slight misgivings about doing yet another overhead landscape design (just like my last two entries). I started off looking at said fresco, and started planning out in my mind how I would transform the outlines into a map. The next step would have to be sketching out a simplified version of the forms.

As I pictured in my head how I would draw semi-stick figures, a different inspiration came to me in a flash! I could create that image, as well as a bunch of other well-known paintings, in the style of traffic signs! Ah ha! I hit all the mainstays - see if you can name them all!



A note about scale. I like to work small, but since most of the contests are for designs on a fat quarter (18" x 21"), shown at the size above, small prints don't come off so well. But something I noticed other Spoonflower designers have done is to post the same design at different scales. So I decided to give that a try. I put the size above in the contest, and then reduced it to the size below, which is the actual scale I would like were I to use this in a quilt or something.



There a few tricks like that I've seen other designers use - like I had contemplated for my too-small Hanukkah calendar, if there are contests for specific-sized designs (rather than straight repeats), some will create designs one size larger that have bonus elements. For instance, if you "up-size" from buying a 8"-by-8" swatch with a single ornament pattern on it, and get a fat quarter, then you actually get several different ornaments. Or, if you get a fat quarter sized calendar on the more expensive fabric (which is wider), then you get a couple of coasters next to the calendar. These upgrades, completely non-coincidentally, provide more money to the designer! An even more time-consuming way to nudge people to buy more of your designs is to make the contest entries part of a coordinating collection of at least three or four different designs. I definitely don't have the time to create that many every week, but it's still an interesting idea to keep in mind.

Back to the design at hand - here are all the paintings I included:

• Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow by Piet Mondrian
• The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai
• Orange and Yellow by Mark Rothko
• The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
• The Kiss by Gustav Klimt
• The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
• The Scream by Edvard Munch
• Water-Lily Pond by Claude Monet
• The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo
• The Son of Man by Rene Magritte
• Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
• The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli
• Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

The background is supposed to be reminiscent of the perforated square metal poles some traffic signs are mounted on.
I'm pretty happy with how it came out. If I were to keep working on it, I would rotate around the individual paintings to various angles so that it could be used as a multi-directional tossed print. I have a tendency to treat my designs as regular drawings so they end up with a very obvious right side up. I tried to overcome this in things like the candy design, but then I realized I had still put the shiny reflections on the same sides of all the candies. I might also have tried to unify the palette across all the paintings a bit more. It's a funny and striking design, IMO, but it's really not very pretty. I mean, I can't imagine someone actually using this in a quilt or for a pillowcase or something. Maybe a dress for Ms. Frizzle! It came in 84 out of 158, with 62 votes.