After school snacks

For the contest about "after school snacks," I went with the classic cracker trio - you know, that assortment that has a butterfly shape, a bowtie shape, and a rectangle. I put the crackers on top of some classic handwriting practice paper (a design I recreated so I could make this one).



This one REALLY bombed - it only got four votes and came in DEAD LAST. Wow! This was a little surprising considering that seven people "liked" it during the voting - and every other time I've seen, a lot more people vote for a design than "like" it. Just one of life's mysteries, I suppose.

My favorites were the very stylized fruit and nuts and strawberry fruit snacks.

Goats

For the "goats" theme, Spoonflower gave us the colors to use:


Color by COLOURlovers

(Plus white.)

I definitely wanted to feature the eyes of the goats, as that's one of the most distinctive things about that type of animal. So I went with a straightforward arrangement of simplified goat heads.



This didn't quite make it into the top half of entries. My favorite was this one, which used crosshatching to expand the apparent range of colors, for a lovely glowy look.

National Parks

For the "National Parks" contest, I focused on the national parks in California. I was originally going to make some kind of ornate badge or patch for each park, but decided I didn't have enough time for that. Instead I focused on a typographical approach. I started off using just the colors in the National Park Service logo, but that turned out too dull so I added more greens, blues, and grays, until each of the eight hexes had a distinct color.



The texture is the ivy vine from this design. This actually did decently and made it into the top third of designs. My favorite was the entry that had unique bottlecaps for all FIFTY-NINE national parks!

Baseball

For the theme of baseball, I ask my husband (who watched a lot more baseball growing up than I did), what some of his favorite memories or aspects of baseball were. One of the things he mentioned was filling out scorecards during games. I've never done that, but I loved filling out forms as a kid, so I bet I would have enjoyed it. So, I thought I would do a design that mimicked all the little lines and boxes on a scorecard.

I started out with these colors, but ended up modifying the blue and buff and using just those:


Color by COLOURlovers

I thought it was a little more interesting rotated into diamonds:



I also did a straight up-and-down version in black and white. This barely cracked into the top half of entries. Interestingly, someone immediately bought a full yard of it! Pretty exciting.

My favorite entry was the winner, which featured highly textured bats.

What's in your bag

The theme for this contest entry was "what's in your bag?" I have a recurring anxiety dream around not having a bag (or having an insufficient bag) so I used that as a jumping-off point for "bags within bags." I used the same color set as the candle design I did a while back.



The anxiety dream is always in a different place with different things, but the common thread is that I have some awkward set of objects I have to carry, and I'm stuck out in public walking around for awhile. For instance, I'm on a school field trip to a museum with a big heavy backpack full of papers and books, and someone gives me a kitten I also have to keep track of. Or, I've just checked out of a hotel and need to walk across town to somewhere else, and need to carry a stack of magazines and a ceramic snowman. So because of the fear of having some sudden responsibility to carry something around, I always carry a small collapsible bag around in my purse (and my suitcase when travelling).

This did a little better than my entries have been, and came right smack dab in the middle of the contest. My favorite was the one that focused on keys.

Llamas

For the theme "llamas," I went for free-association (semi-) rhyming, adding in "origami" and "pajamas." For the origami part, I used patterns you might see on origami paper, and for pajamas I used the "bedtime" color scheme from a previous contest.



The pattern in the llamas are those stars again, and the background are the water droplets. I'm fairly satisfied with how this came out, but I feel like the way the llama heads are arranged makes your eyes zip across the pattern too quickly, undercutting the calmer vibe I was going for.

As per usual, this came in the bottom quarter of designs. My favorite entry was this cheery folk-art stripe.

Lemonade -> Lemon-aid

Lemonade was the theme for this contest. Since most designs would obviously be mostly yellow, I wanted to come up with a way of using darker colors. I used this as a starting point for what other colors look good with yellows.  And I decided to go for a pun rather than literal lemonade. Hence, lemon-aids:



The background uses the kelp design I'm fond of as a texture. I really like how this turned out - very similar to the pickle herringbone, I like the colors, and the fact that it can be seen as an abstract pattern. But, it didn't even make it out of the bottom ten percent of the contest. My favorites were these sort of mid-century modern lemons (like something out of an old cookbook!) and these very airy graphic lemons.