The moon, the sun, and so forth

For the theme "lunar cycles," I made a representation of how the lunar cycle matches up with the sun. Specifically, I realized I wasn't clear on what cycle determined whether you could see the moon during the day or night. So, I looked it up! The answer being: at the full moon, it rises at sunset, and rises later each day, until at the new moon it's rising at sunrise. So I tried to capture this:



The gray half-circles indicate when the moon is up, and the yellow/orange represent when the sun is up. The small light blue half-circles are for the high tides. I tried to balance being representational with being abstract enough to be a usable stripe/dot. It came in the bottom half of entries.

I knew there would be a lot of designs that had all the phases laid out in a row like I did, but I stuck with it anyway. My favorite in that vein was this one, plus this one that put them in a circle. Others I liked were the ones that looked like a quilt, sort of Scandinavian, or retro and sketchy.

Fitness and health

For the theme of "fitness," I was still thinking about the various glyphs and symbols I worked with last week, and wanted to do some basic icons related to fitness. I have a very young baby (almost 7 weeks!) so I'm not able to think much beyond the essential functions for life. So I came up with some very straightforward advice on health: get enough sleep, get some exercise, eat a balanced diet, and drink plenty of water. I made little "icons" for each of these.



For the colors, I used the "Doctor" colors from the synergy project, which I hadn't used yet. This entry came in very near the bottom of the contest. My favorite was this nice usage of running shoe treads.

The yearly calendar

Every year Spoonflower does a contest to put next year's calendar in a fat quarter-sized design, such that it can be used as a tea towel - you can see my previous entries here. This year, I was initially going to go with something generic that people like to have in their kitchens. Uhh, lavender flowers! And let's add fleur-de-lis and go for a French theme. But when I started trying to make the basic layout of all the numbers, it seemed kind of dumb and pointless. Back to the drawing board.

I had been laying it out in a diagonal checkerboard pattern, so I stuck with that. Then I had the thought to fill the background of each of the diamonds I was going to put a month in with just a large initial for the month. But, starting with "J", that seemed like it left too much empty space, so then I did the three-letter abbreviations instead, trying to stack them together like Mayan glyphs.

The Mayan connection reminded me of the ancient Egyptian colors I used before, so I used those. I made a polka dot background - instead of just circles, it's X's, stars, hexagons, and bursts, which you can see better here. I'm actually really happy with how that came out - it's one of the few designs I've made that came out exactly like I envisioned it.

In any case, the calendar came together like so:



It didn't go anywhere in the contest, but two people bought it. My favorite was this one.

After the apocalypse

This week's contest was another one for a toile, but with a "post-apocalyptic" theme. I went right for the "only the cockroaches will be left" approach, and drew some giant, irradiated cockroaches wandering around in overgrown ruins. I tried somewhat to emulate the style of Tom Gauld as a guide to conveying atmosphere without a ton of detail.



For the colors, I used a subset of the ones from my sandcastle entry, since I thought it had a bit of an eerie feeling. This came in near the bottom of the results. My favorite entries were this cartoony one that depicts life after an alien takeover and this sketchy, nearly-abandoned cityscape..