Here’s what I submitted to the gallery for my Bootcamp assignment. Read about the process on my new website, and make sure to keep following the new site (www.tashagoddard.com).

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This first month, we’ve been illustrating The Frog Princess and here are my first couple of spots for it. I need to do at least one more, and I’d like to do a few more in the second style, but thought I’d put something up here to share with you for the moment, anyway!

This first one is the King (or Tsar) telling his three sons to go take an arrow and shoot it as far as they can, then pick a wife from wherever it lands (the third son’s arrow lands in a swamp, and they only creature he can find there is a frog). This didn’t use any of the techniques Carla had introduced as I was too busy with work to get my paints out, but I did squeeze in some time to do this drawing with pen and Inktense pencils (media I use for a lot of pictures!).

This one included some collage, which was part of this month’s media, as well as watercolours (which I rarely use – tend to use Inktense or gouache) and which I found more comfortable to use having watched Carla’s videos. This illustration is mid-way through the story when the third prince’s wife is relieved to be an actual princess who had an enchantment on her. I used my new Pentel brush pen, as well as the watercolour, and the collage elements are actually cut out from some Moo postcards I got of some of my patterns (so they’re my art, too).

I’m hoping to squeeze in the last technique in my final illustrations, which involves combining pastel and watercolour in a rather funky way. If I manage it (and am reasonably happy with the result), I will share it with you here.

Oh, and finally, here’s a sketch I was doing for another spot, which got a bit of a different kind of medium on it – yes, I spilt red wine on it. Oops.

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Original doodles

Leaf pattern

Here, I extracted a lot of the leaf elements and layered them up using different opacities. (Repeats done by Illustrator and the Pattern tool.)

Mark-making doodle

Here, I extracted a number of the mark-making elements – spirals, mini flowers, lines and created a number of different layers with different opacities and rotations. I think it’s actually a little bit like fireworks.

Bouquets

And here’s the main floral pattern with some large, bold bouquets and a layered background taking elements from the original doodles – simple flowers and large leaves.

I love how the pen can give the different line sizes I like to include with just the same pen – I’ll probably still throw in some Micron 005 detail now and again, but it’s great to be able to have one pen to do so much. The only trouble is that it bleeds quite a bit on most of my sketchbooks – even the very flat one. Works very well on plain printer paper, though, so that’s OK.

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The proper assignment will come next week – this was just me having fun. I wonder what it will be! 

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The bit in the brief that really jumped out at me was “Female Icons … handbags, shoes …” Leaving aside the feminist in me who feels annoyed that these are the traditional female icons (I will use different means to work on that one – actually, the last time I entered a ‘female surface design’ competition with Tigerprint, I did have a go at subverting that tradition, with this ‘I Can’ design), the phrase jumped into my head ‘You can never have too many shoes,’ followed by ‘You can never have too many bags,’ and it kind of followed from there. I wanted to have some pink in there (sorry – again with the lack of subversion) and went and looked at my Kuler, where I collect colour palettes I make from photos, or just from colours, and looked for ones with pink. This one felt right – the blue works well with the pink, I feel, and having a very darker colour and a very light one for contrast and to provide the ‘neutral’ effect, was good, too.

The drawings are all hand-drawn, scanned, touched up in Photoshop, then live traced in Illustrator, and then broken apart into silhouettes, subtractive blocks and the lines, which are layered over the top. The text is all my own hand-drawn text and the same ‘You can never have too many’ is used throughout, with different pop colours and then the relevant word added in.

I did try to do a more hand-drawn spot in the middle to place the text in, but it just didn’t work – the cleanliness of the circle (and the square in which the whole is contained) contrasts well with the sketchiness of the loose hand-drawings.

I’m very pleased with these. They do have some similarities to the I can I linked to above, but I feel the colours and the layering have grown from the knowledge and experience I’ve gained on Module 1 and Module 2 of The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design. I’m going to be doing Module 3 in March and have also just embarked on two longer-term courses – Carla Sonheim’s The Year of the Fairy Tale and Lilla Rogers’ MATS Bootcamp. I’m so excited about all this creative learning and inspiration I’m getting now.

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Sorry, I’ve been very remiss in posting stuff here. I’ve been super busy with The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design Module 2 and have recently embarked on a year-long course ‘The Year of the Fairy Tale’. I’ve also signed up for Lilla Rogers’ MATS Bootcamp and will be starting Module 3 of The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design in March. I am loving learning loads and loads of new stuff and making lots of new designs and getting painting commissions. I also sold some cards and prints at Christmas markets. I am determined that, by the end of this year, I will be earning a substantial part of my income from illustrations and designs. In the meantime, though, I’m having such fun designing, drawing, painting, designing, designing…

I will try to post more pictures and designs, as I create them. I have a feeling that The Year of the Fairy Tale is going to be a whole other level of inspiration for me.

Here are some blue and white designs I created tonight. I’ve been drawn to a lot of blue and white designs lately and thought I’d see what I could do with some blue and white. My favourite of them is the flowers, but I’m pleased with the effect overall.

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I’ve been rather into Arts and Crafts recently and have been inspired to create a lot of patterns that draw on the era and style. Here are a few of them. They are hand drawn and then coloured and manipulated in Illustrator CC. The colour palette is also drawn from a variety of Arts and Crafts prints.

I think these would look good on wallpaper, stationery, upholstery… (Available to license…)

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I have some prints of this for sale for £5 + (UK) P&P £1.50 if you’re interested.

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The other night I had finished painting a small commission and was enjoying painting so much I kept going and at first just did lots of little bits and pieces on the big rough watercolour sheets I have from Ken Bromley Art Supplies (seriously good value and it’s on offer at the moment) and I found myself doing quite a few letters with the slab brush, so I got out one of the ‘good’ pieces of watercolour (which actually don’t seem much different to those rough ones) and started doing an alphabet painting:

I really love the translucent effect, which is not the way I usually use gouache (I’m all about the thick slabs of opaque paint normally!). I also love the colours, which are mostly neat colours from the (Winsor and Newton) tubes of paint (I think I added a bit of white to the green).

I’ll post up some of the hand-drawn type I did recently, too.

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