Every week of MATS A focuses on a different market, and last week it was on Bolt Fabric. The theme was "vintage kitchen" and root vegetables and vintage casserole dishes.
The first couple of days we were encouraged to explore image making using whatever medium we desired and make a lot of icons of root vegetables and casserole dishes.
The first thing I did was buy a bunch of vegetables. I love anything having to do with food. :)
I had fun playing around with gouache which I never use but have always wanted to. The last time I seriously used it was years ago at Art Center in a mandatory design class, and I hated it. But I've always loved the way it looked in illustration, so I broke out some old paint (it had hardened of course, but I reconstituted with water and a bit of gum arabic) and bought a couple of tubes of new paint.
I also fooled around with potato prints. This would be fun to do more of in the future. I love the texture! I tried using both print block ink and black acrylic, and I found I preferred the acrylic.
I ended up not using these in the final piece but I am saving my scans, because I'm sure they will come in handy later!
I also did massive amounts of sketching (pages and pages!) and inked the ones I liked. I ended up having way too many icons, I had to edit it down. My color pattern is based on this cute dress I saw in a Garnet Hill catalog.
In the end, I was happy with my final submission. But the process was a bit stressful for me due to general insecurities about doing something outside of my comfort zone. Also, initially I felt like I should make everything in Illustrator, but I felt paralyzed at the start. I just couldn't get into it, so I ended up making my main pattern in Photoshop. Then it was a lot more fun. My favorite icon is the teeny tiny rooster (which I had to shrink) on the pitcher. The night before I dreamt of him and decided to add him into the pattern.
Here is the main pattern with the coordinating patterns:
I would like to get it printed at spoonflower.com and make an apron out of it. :)
This week, Lilla mentioned in her post the other day that too much change = stress and paralysis (I'm paraphrasing here). I've decided to really take that to heart. The market we are exploring is Home Decor, which I have no experience in as with Bolt Fabric. I am approaching it as a learning experience with no expectations. It is a purely decorative theme, and I'm actually really enjoying painting flowers and leaves and vines in a graphic representation, independent of an illustration. More about that next week when I will share what I came up with!