Animal spirit

I don't know why, but lately I've been painting animals. Probably because it's fun :)

Mood boards II

Mood Boards

I spend tons of time browsing the web and collecting reference images. For ages these files have just been sitting around on my desktop begging to be sorted, so I finally spent a bit of time arranging and organizing. It used to be I would sort by subject matter, but these days I'm finding it much more useful to sort by color because then I end up with these great mood boards. Here's a few that I whipped up this afternoon:

S/S Favourites

Dolce & Gabbana's S/S 2013 collection is so fun and inspiring I just couldn't help throwing together a quick blog with some of my favourites of their featured prints. Enjoy!

Summer botanicals

Well it's that time of year again. A new season means new blooms at the Garden. Since moving to the Pacific North West Coast I've really become aware of seasonal gardening and I'm blown away by the amount of planning and work it takes to maintain a large one of these types of gardens.

Lately I've gotten into doing these kaleidoscopic-type floral collages with the photos from my garden expeditions. I find they're a great way to loosen my brain up after spending a lot of time doing tightly controlled work. Here's a couple of iterations:

Hue/Saturation Chart

Okay, so I was reading some more through Johannes Itten's The Art of Color and he had an impressive looking plate of hue/saturation (color) chart.

I've heard of people trying to replicate this chart in order to test their color skills, and when I came across it I thought "Ok, lets give this a go".

So...

I feel as though I might have done this same exercise back in my art school days. My eye has completely changed since then and I think attempting to replicate this chart with as much precision as possible is really helpful.

Here's something interesting:

I color picked my hand-painted chart in Photoshop. It was really hard to stay honest, especially since the watercolor paint that I used gave many of the squares an uneven shade and I could kind of pick from regions that helped me make the chart look more accurate then it actually was.

Basic Instinct

When I was in art school I didn't see the point of studying painting because it seemed obvious to me the process was instinctive, not something that could be taught.

These days however, since I've made Print and Pattern Design my focus, I've been struggling a bit with color. Instinct can only take one so far before you start asking yourself why your choices have the effect they do.

 I borrowed a copy of Johannes Itten's The Art of Color to better understand the relationships between colors. He had a couple of interesting exercises pertaining to subjective color that I thought I'd try out. These are watercolor painting using colors I am most drawn too. Essentially using instinct/intuition to create "harmonized" personal color palettes. After doing about 10 different painting, I was surprised to see how similar they all are when placed side by side. 

And what did I learn about myself? 

Apparently I've got about as much subtlety when it comes to color as Rainbow Bright!

Floral explosion!

Getting in touch with my inner William Morris.
This always happens when I visit the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens.

Graphics moments on the Highline

I was in New York about a month ago with my husband working on a photographic tour of the city. A highlight for me was the Highline Park. The park is built on an old rail about 1.5 stories above street level and winds in and amongst the buildings of the lower west side neighbourhoods. It's a great way to experience the architecture and gives you an idea of how much work, thought and design goes into a city like New York.

Watercolor tests

Shape Crazy!

It's spring and I've got palettes to match!

I snagged most of these images off of Pinterest and generated the palettes myself.

Latest shapes

I have been obsessing about this shape for a while. It's wild and unwieldly, and I love it. But I didn't know how to use it.



Then I signed up for this workshop at Blim and realized it would make an awesome screen print.



The results are in...






and I'm very happy.

Also, check out my latest collaboration with Seams French!

New work with PS brushes