From Greeting Cards to Repeating Patterns . . .

Mock Orange and Weigelia Bone China Coffee Mug, Bone China Mugs by helikettle
 

A few days ago, a customer ordered three of the coffee mugs in my Zazzle store. I was over the moon!

I didn’t make a huge amount of money from the sale and it was just one sale among many at this time of year. But it meant an awful lot to me because the three mugs were ones I had created with my repeating floral patterns earlier this year.

So the sale came as a kind of affirmation that I’m on the right track in shifting my main focus away from greeting cards towards pattern making. And as well as that, my own reaction showed me that the bold floral patterns are my first love – which is probably a helpful pointer in determining my ‘signature style’.

Over the course of the past ten years, I’ve gone from Fine Art – my pastel paintings – to greeting cards – to repeating pattern design and I feel I have finally homed in on what I love to create the most.

Wallflowers Birthday Card by helikettle

I do enjoy designing greeting cards but I absolutely love creating patterns! I find it quite addictive – I just wish my technical knowledge could keep up with my enthusiasm!

One of the things I find difficult about creating greeting cards is that I really dislike cards with verse inside, particularly if it is ‘sentimental’. And unfortunately it seems that there are many customers for whom the ‘verse’ is just as important as the artwork.

 

Sunflowers Birthday Card by helikettle
online at Zazzle.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I prefer to let the design do the talking, conveying the sentiments more subtly through the image. And while that suits plenty of people, it also excludes many potential customers for my cards.

To my great relief, there is no ‘verse’ to worry about in Pattern Design! It’s simply a case of putting together shapes, lines and colours in a pleasing way . . .

 

Pretty Scarlet and Yellow Nasturtiums Jumbo Mug by helikettle
 

. . . or is it?

Many years ago, when I first discovered William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement, I read something to the effect that a pattern should always evoke a feeling, recreate an atmosphere, transport the beholder to a place they would like to be. I have searched the internet in vain, trying to find the exact quote. But the gist of it has always stayed with me.

So, in a way, a pattern carries just as much of a message as a greeting card. It just does it in a much more subtle, sometimes almost subliminal, way.

But there’s nothing very subtle about flowers, which I must admit form the basis of most of my designs to date. Most of us love gardens and flowers and in the case of a city flat-dweller, a floral blind or coffee mug may be the nearest they get to a garden on a day-to-day basis. And that provides me with the motivation to keep on working – or, more accurately, playing – with the constantly inspiring ‘source-book’ that Mother Nature provides!

Pretty Spring Primroses Bone China Coffee Mug, Porcelain Mug by helikettle

What feelings do floral patterns (not necessarily mine!) evoke in you?

Early Flowers and Late Flowers - Snowdrops and Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums are one of my favourite flowers.

They go on flowering well into the Autumn and as the afternoons grow shorter towards winter, I've often been cheered by their bright glow in the dusk as I look out from my work. So after the trials and tribulations of piecing together my repeating pattern last week, I was all the more determined to bring that experience to an outcome that I'd be pleased with.

And this is it: the tracing from last week's post with colour added!

And here is the Messenger Bag that this was originally designed for:

Scarlet and Yellow Nasturtiums Courier Bag by helikettle

You'll see why I needed a large area of repeating pattern, if you go to my:

 Mugs, Mousepads & More - cases etc

blog

- where you can see the whole of the back of the Messenger Bag, as well as a range of sleeves and planners that complement it.

Of course, as I love creating pretty tea pots, pitchers, mugs etc, the design also found its way onto some of them as well - not forgetting a few greeting cards -

Mugs, Mousepads & More -  teapots etc

Pleased as I was, in the end, with my 'Summer Garden' design, I hoped to move on to something less challenging for my daughter's birthday card.

Her birthday is in February, the month that I always associate with snowdrops. Lord Alfred Tennyson called them 'Fair Maids of February' and, delving into my huge old file of screenprinting designs that I've hoarded since the 1980's, I came across this scruffy little tracing -

This was great news as, although I have crocuses flowering in my garden, there's no sign of the snowdrops from previous years and I read somewhere that they don't like heavy clay soil - which is precisely what ours is!

So, on Friday afternoon, I scanned the tracing, enlarged it, printed it out and traced it again, ready for the lightbox. I was undecided about the best way to go about painting the blue background, which I could see would be interminably fiddly with all those stalks and petals to paint round - especially as I'm not a person who enjoys working meticulously, especially in paint!

One option would be to make a collage, but again, those stems would mean a lot of tricky cutting! Another way would be to use masking fluid, but I only use that when nothing else will do because it ruins brushes and is sometime difficult to get accurate enough. Then I happened upon a solution in Alison Kolesar's blog:  Jumping in Puddles, where she suggests painting the whole background wash in transparent watercolours and then using gouache to paint the light colours - in my case the flowers.

So that's what I did and I was very happy with my beautiful, sunshiny sky-blue background - until I scanned it and 'Technology' let me down again! As I found with some of my seaside collages, my scanner seems to be unhappy with light blues and greens in close proximity and makes as real mess of them. 

No amount of adjusting helped to put this right:

So I'll leave you to wonder if and how I'll manage to retrieve this dismal attempt at a birthday card for my daughter . . . watch this space!

. 

The Cat and the Nasturtiums - Repeating Patterns

My cat didn’t change as much as my dragon did – and here it is as a birthday card for one of my grandsons, ready to post off to him today:

Comic Cat 12th Birthday Card

Moving on, this week’s project has been inspired by Zazzle’s launch of Messenger Bags and various matching sleeves. The bag requires a large, seamless area of pattern as the design begins underneath, goes right the way up the back and over the front to include the flap.

For me this presented a particularly exciting challenge because more than twenty years ago, I very much wanted to enrol on a ‘Surface Pattern’ course at our local Art School in Norwich. But sadly, I discovered that I would have to travel quite a distance each day as that particular course was held out at the coast, at Great Yarmouth. That was out of the question for me at that time because of family commitments and I made do with creating repeating patterns to screenprint on fabric at home instead.

Of course, all this was long before computers and photo-editing programs so I planned my designs using squared paper, tracing paper, a huge old photocopier and, for the screenprinting, vast quantities of black thread!

On Friday afternoon I set out to make a repeating pattern the old-fashioned way, using one of my watercolour flowers designs as my starting point.

Instead of the old photocopier I had previously used, I scanned my tracings and printed them out before cutting them into quarters.

and flipping them over to make a space for the upside down design . . .

But I ran into a problem and soon found myself in a terrible muddle of cut-up pieces of design and masking tape and nothing was fitting together as it was intended!

Eventually I realised that the reason that my pattern 'bits' weren't matching up was because my printer was choosing what size to print out the various parts! The difference wasn’t huge but it was enough to make a nonsense of my carefully thought out plan and there was nothing I could do about it!.

Luckily, after several increasingly frustrating hours of trying this and that, I found a way to do the same thing on my computer, by ‘virtually’ cutting up my design and using ‘layers’ to reposition the elements before printing out the whole thing and tracing it, ready to paint. Must admit, I felt a certain sense of victory over my capricious printer!

This may look like a meaningless jumble of shapes - and it isn’t helped by the fact that I rather hurriedly traced over the pencil lines with my wacom tablet when the tracing paper scan came out rather faint for posting online. 

But next week, all will be revealed!



PS If you would like to know  how to make a repeating pattern design without resorting to a computer, click here for  a good, clear explanation - it is more or less the method I've always used and the only reason it didn’t work for me this time was that my printer has a mind of its own!

November Nasturtiums

This afternoon I did something that I really hate to do! It was all because of the weather forecast which had made it very clear that today was going to be one of the few fine days we can expect in the coming week or more. Even though it was decidedly cold, the sunshine lured me out into the garden to tidy it up for the winter, knowing that, from tomorrow onwards, deep 'lows' will swoop over the British Isles, bringing with them high winds and heavy rain.

There was quite a bit of tidying to do - I call it 'putting the garden to bed for the winter'. The smaller, shady area at the side of the house, the part that I look out onto from my dining room where I mostly work, was so overgrown that it was impossible to make out the path from the main part of the garden to the dining room French doors! A large and healthy looking antirrhinum has seeded itself right in front of the doors and the nasturtiums seem to love this less sunny area and were threatening, triffid-like, to take over! They had thrown out long shoots everywhere, up the drainpipes and behind the shed, rooted themselves in the gravel path, entangled themselves in the honeysuckle and even climbed the jasmine's trellis almost to the height of the bedroom windowsills. Simply trying to walk through what was once a path, one risked getting caught and tripped up by their interwoven stems, hiding under huge leaves as big as saucers!

So really, something had to be done, they had to come out! But the trouble was that they were still in flower! On recent afternoons when it has seemed to get dark so very early, I loved to look out on these splashes of scarlet and orange that seemed to light up the view from my French doors. It was almost as if someone had lit candles along the path and hung them from the walls!

That apart, I have a real aversion to uprooting plants that are flowering and nearly always manage to avoid it. The life cycle of a plant is too similar to that of  human to make it easy to casually destroy one that is blooming its heart out! But today it had to be done. So to lessen the feeling of waste, I picked the flowers that hadn't started to fade and here they are in a vase -

They won't last long indoors - flowers that have been exposed to low temperatures never do - but I think it's a lot better than putting them straight into the compost bag!

The apples are waiting for the blackbirds to get hungry! They've feasted on them the past two winters and they're welcome to them as they are pretty tasteless. There are a few roses, mountain cornflowers and marigolds blooming as well - that's one in the distance to the left of the path where the apples are. The seasons seem to be behaving really strangely!

Who would have thought I'd be picking nasturtiums well into November!

July Garden Update

With the change in the month came a change in the weather - our first real rain for weeks! In Wales, usually known to be unrelentingly wet, this first half of 2010 has been the driest since 1929 and the second driest for 100 years! So the heavy rain at the end of last week was welcome for the garden and fortunately it came in the night and  brought to an end the really hot weather, though it's still been pleasantly warm.

It's also brought with it a noticeable change in my garden with many of the flowers that made late May and June so glorious, past now their best and the later flowering plants not quite reaching their peak. I look upon it as the garden taking a bit of a rest after the abundant, almost extravagant displays of June. 

My Alchemist climbing rose went from this:

through various colour stages,

 - to this:

- and is now in dire need of dead-heading! But it's really earned its keep, not only in terms of the pleasure it brings but it started me thinking about occasionally using photos for greeting cards, something I hadn't previously done very much.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the predominant colours of the garden change with the seasons? We begin with the yellows of primroses, daffodils and crocuses and the purples of bluebells and yellow and blue irises in Spring.

Then the early summer flowering plants seems to be predominantly pink, blue and white,

while the later flowers tend to be bright reds and oranges.

 These nasturtiums in my kitchen window-box are just beginning to peep out from behind their rather over-sized leaves.

And my organic runner beans, planted rather late in a tub, are just beginning to flower - red again!

It's been really difficult to photograph flowers this year because we've had such a windy few months and the plants tend to sway around vigorously, which my camera doesn't much like!

The big white daisies are getting going -

Mine never stand up straight because the high walls mean they have to lean forwards to get the light - but I rather like the way their stems curve!

I moved my lilies last Autumn and they seem to be sulking, producing mostly just one bloom at the time -

And the self-seeded Californian Poppies are a bit thin on the ground this year.

It seems to be mostly the orange and red flowers that succumbed to the very low temperatures last winter, though my lovely red salvia that I thought was well and truly dead, has sprung a few new green shoots recently. Probably too late to flower this year, but at least it's alive - as is the Spanish Jasmine in my front porch, which looked thoroughly dead until a couple of weeks ago! I always give plants the benefit of the doubt and don't immediately remove the dead-looking ones for the sake of tidiness -  and I'm invariably rewarded for my patience.

Of course there are exceptions to the colour pattern I've described but it seems to me to be striking enough to make me wonder whether there's a scientific explanation - maybe to do with the amount of daylight available?

Earlier today I enjoyed a picnic lunch in the Linda Vista Gardens (above), celebrating the birthday of one of our Walking Group leaders. It's a beautiful terraced garden, sloping down from the edge of the town to the Castle Meadows, open to the public but as not many people know of its existence, it tends to be little frequented, except when the ABGV Borough Band puts on a concert of a summer evening. (You can see one of my pastel paintings of the audience on Red Bubble.) It's one of the most peaceful spots I know of around these parts, with a view of the Blorenge mountain, and one of my favourites places to go to take photos. Today there were still plenty of roses blooming as well as all sorts of lesser know plants and I had a field day with my camera! So if anyone needs flower photos for reference for a painting, please just ask! It's quite likely that I'll have something suitable on my poor groaning computer!

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