Do you love pugs? I know that people who love pugs REALLY LOVE pugs, so my new “I Love Pugs” pattern design is for you! I’ve entered this one in this week’s Spoonflower “Dog Days” Design Challenge! Link  here to the Voting Page! 

This is the beginning of a brand new pattern design collection featuring gorgeous birds and flowers in luscious, warm colours. My inspirations for this collection were: Indian textiles, a bird figurine souvenir I picked up in Japan, and food (yup, photos of limes, red peppers and mushrooms posted in The Colour Gang for this month’s food styling inspiration theme started off the colour palette!) You never know where inspiration will come from...
​These first designs are now available to license (more from this new collection coming soon!)

Victoria Johnson's excellent 5-week course "Create Collections" finished today. I really recommend this course if you are a surface pattern designer who wants to create gorgeous pattern collections (who of us doesn't?) for fabrics, home decor, etc. It is well-paced and really teaches how to focus and think about every step that goes into creating a collection: colour palettes, designing placement prints, understanding secondary and coordinate patterns. If you are interested in learning more about Victoria's courses, check out Victoria Johnson Create Explore! Meanwhile, here is a peek at the collection I designed during the course!

I decided to enter my "Pink Flamingos" pattern design in this week's Spoonflower "Paint By Numbers" Design Challenge because it reminds me of all those black velvet paintings...remember those? You can link to the Voting Page here to see all the entries!

​Here is the start of a new pattern design collection that I am going to call "Celestun" because it was influenced by the trip I took a couple years ago to Merida in the Yucatan, Mexico. Nearby is the Celestun Biosphere Reserve where flocks of wild pink flamingos feed on shrimps that live in mangrove forests along the Ria Celestun. 

One thing that is great being a member of The Colour Gang is it makes you think about colour palettes and how re-colouring existing motifs can really revise an older pattern design into something fun and new! As an example, I recoloured my "Coastal Critters" motifs (originally designed as placement prints for round plates!) and used them to make some eye-catching, sea-themed repeat patterns. I did try to put all 3 creatures into a single design, but that just didn't work. I also tried using differently coloured creatures in a single design (I tried so many combos) but that didn't sit well either. Sometimes simpler is better. So I finally realized that making 3 separate designs, each with its own creature and monochromatic colour scheme (based on my Japan-inspired "Neon Nights" colour palette from a few posts ago), somehow worked the best, in my opinion! Now I love these! So here they are..."Blue Jellyfish", "Pink Squid" and "Green Octopus"! I hope they make you smile!

A couple of weeks ago in the Colour Gang, the creative challenge was to create a tropical-themed pattern using one of 3 (or all 3!) colour palettes given. The one I decided on was called "Midnight Forest"...featuring dark grounds, exotic forests and their inhabitants. So here is my brand new "Dream" pattern design...can you spot the "inhabitant"?

​Now that the portfolio-building course FolioFocus 2018 is over (alas!) I decided to just design something I wanted to, with no particular brief/trend/theme in mind! So here is my new "Fanciful" Collection...love these colours. I never thought I liked brown much, but I do like the earthiness of this colour palette! How about you?