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.

Bananas and Bricks

We had another limited palette contest, this time with these colors:

The middle coral color is the 2019 color of the year, hence the theme. I wanted to do something a little silly so I drew bananas - a funny word on its own, plus Bruce is kind of obsessed with the word. (Not the first time I've included bananas because of him). The layout is inspired by this classic pattern.



So of course the "keystone" color is the one I used the least of! My favorite entry was the pencils.

Then, there was kind of a weird theme of "Desert Modernism." What this really meant was that a foundation in Phoenix, Arizona that preserves Mid-Century Modernism specifically, and specifically around Phoenix, was looking for a design to use on throw pillows at an event. Ooookay. I took inspiration from one of the houses they feature on their site, the David Wright house (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his son).



My favorites were these two - I do love me an isometric landscape!

Two different retro styles

For the Moon Landing design (another collaboration with Princess Awesome) I re-used the moon landing design I already made for "the sixties," but with different colors.



It actually did a little better this time. My favorite entry was this one.

Then, the theme was rockabilly. I wanted to do a cheater print combining some of the fabrics/motifs the style is known for - stripes, dots, checks, plaids, bandanas, denim, skulls, and cherries. I remembered that I had already done a cheater print of entirely denim before, so I reused that but added some of the other prints in.



I only had time to do a few of the other prints. It would probably look a little nicer if I worked in some other designs - some burgundy bandana print and some red and black plaid, say. My favorite was the tattoo print.

Animal print

For the animal print contest, I did a pattern very loosely based on snakeskin:



My favorite entries were the fingerprints and turtle shells.

Valentine's Day, a month early

This week's contest was the V-day theme. Nothing more specific this year - just "be my valentine." I wanted to do something with cupids. I fell back on one of my favorite patterns - the good ol' cube optical illusion tessellation. (such as this or this or this).



And so I called it "Cube-pid!" Ha!

My favorites were the Mary Blair-esque animals and the matches.

Happy 2019!

Happy new year! The last contest of 2018 carried over two weeks, so that nobody would have to log in and vote during Christmas week. This was the "astrology" theme. I went with the Chinese zodiac and re-used something I made already. I had made this for year of the monkey and had so much fun I made all twelve. So for this one I just put all the symbols together:



My favorite was this simple "bubble" version of the zodiac symbols.

November-December catchup

OK, a few designs to catch up on!

For the "gender-neutral nursery wallpaper" contest, I went with the good ol' alphabet.

I actually wanted this to be a much larger repeat. I drew it such that the repeat would be four feet wide. However, I forgot that with wallpaper the max width of repeats is only two feet. (You can do extremely large repeats vertically though) So I had to make it half the size, darn it. The entry I'd be most likely to ever use was the pufferfish.

The next contest was Chinoiserie. I used a variety of CC-licensed icons and used colors reminiscent of Chinese vases. (I wanted to stay away from the classic blue-on-white since I knew the majority of entries would use that) And then, in a strike of utter brilliance, I forgot to actually enter it in the contest!

Oh well. My favorite was the koi fish.

Next! Something inspired by Fair Isle-style knitting. I wanted to do something that isn't normally on a Fair Isle sweater so I did poison dart frogs.

My favorite was the dragons.

For the "holidays around the world" I represented the celebration my mom made up for the winter solstice - chocolate pie, mixed nuts in the shell (of which I showed just pecans, my favorite) and mandarin oranges. I only had a very small window of time to work on it so I'm not all that proud of it.

My favorite was the little vintage-style snowy village.

Them, we had another wallpaper contest - for "large-scale black and white." I was able to correct my error of last time and kept the two-foot width in mind. I was inspired by this photo and came up with this:

The ones I liked the best were the monsters, the geometric clovers, these planets, and the columns.

For the sloth theme, I took a basic scallop shape and made it sloth faces:

My favorite entry was this one.

And there we go! Happy Holidays!