Pysanky

So for the pysanky contest, my struggle was how to do something different. I knew that most of the entries would be depictions of traditionally-decorated eggs, either scattered, in a grid, or scalloped - or, just the traditional decorations themselves unrolled. What could I do that wouldn't just be an iteration of one of those?

Well, in the same vein as the papercut contest where I depicted the leftovers of doing a papercut, I decided to show the eggs BEFORE they got decorated. I made a lovely little gradient of eggshell colors, inspired by this.



This obviously had no chance of doing particularly well in the contest, but it may work well enough as an interesting - but not TOO interesting - pattern to get some sales. For instance, one of the designs I sell the most of (so perhaps half a dozen per year) is this one based on ye old primary school lined paper. The highly detailed, super-saturated novelty prints do well in contests, but I think they can be tricky to actually use. Most of the overall best sellers are actually quite simple - chevrons, arrows, and crosses, or very limited color usage. It's a little counter-intuitive, as you'd think people would get those kinds of prints more cheaply from regular fabric, rather than paying the premium for print-on-demand.