Hopscotch Fun

I'm on week 4 of the Summer of Creativity course and this week's theme was Humor.

That's a puzzle in the lower left. Yes! Redbubble offers puzzles now!

Get the 1000 piece version and drive yourself crazy!

[puzzle link]

You may need this laughing exercise while working on that:

Spoonflower is doing a "Sports" design challenge and I'm adding the Hopscotch placement design into the contest. I think it might be a good design for bedding, which Spoonflower offers.

The scale is too small, I had to reduce it for the contest and will make it bigger after it's over.

Wait. 

Is hopscotch a sport or a game? 

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I'll update with a link when voting starts 7/30.
Voting is open until 8/4 There are 486 entries in this contest. (Yikes)
Not a winner. Boo.

Linking up with

Michelle's Creative Compulsions

Shelbee's Spread the Kindness

Agapanthus Adventure

Growing out in the front yard is Agapanthus, or Nile Lily:

I used one as a brush to make textures

the setup

lots of texture experiments!

The instigation for this is my participation in the Textile Design Lab's Summer of Creativity.

Since I'm "working from home" three out of five days a week, I thought I'd take advantage of the Lab, which I've used sporadically over the years. The membership cost is not cheap ($490/year, $49/month-to-month) but a bargain if you compare it to the cost of the Otis Extension course I used to teach ($800/10 weeks).

The Summer of Creativity this year is themed on Self Care. Weekly, we get a creative exercise hosted by Rita Patel (the textures above are the result), then a design brief with inspiration pulled from WGSN.

This week's brief was to design patterns to be used on yoga mats and accessories. 

Tips on how to create mandalas were part of this as well.

My agapanthus Mandala as a placement print

I used one of the textures for the ground

It went over really well in the weekly crit.😄

As a result, the collection has made it onto print on demand products!

Socity6 Yoga Mat (and other things)

Four designs on Spoonflower (can't order until my sample strikeoffs come in)

Agapanthus Mandala Green

Agapanthus Mandala Purple

Agapanthus Purple Toss

Agapanthus Green Toss

Redbubble things (green ground):

link for green ground products

Redbubble things (purple ground):

link for purple ground products

I got a lot of mileage out of this design!

Looking forward to this week's assignment. The theme will be Humor.

Linking up with

Michelle's Creative Compulsions Linky Party
Shelbee's On the Edge of the Week

Textile Design Lab's Summer of Creativity: Editing a Texture

Look!
This:

Came from this:

Lesson Two was a quickie editing technique for textures that ended up working out well on my 2nd try.

1) Added "Content Aware" fills by making a selection, Select > Inverse, hit Delete (choosing Content Aware)
1A) a misfire -- cropping area has too much white edge

[from here on, a reenactment] 

1B, Red shows a tighter selection, better all-over fill 

2) Cropped to an area that I liked (this art not in repeat)

Next, I'll show crops of the transformations without the step-by-step directions.
Maintaining a bit of mystery, since it's not a free course.

 Oops, reenactment doesn't match. Oh well -- glad that I saved the original!

The Textile Design Lab is a monthly membership fee-based site. Well worth it, so far!

Linking up with Shelbee's On the Edge of the Week

Textile Design Lab's Summer of Creativity: Stamping

Tactic #2 to generate some new personal designs was to join in on the Textile Design Lab's [TDL] Summer of Creativity [SoC]. There are weekly lessons, projects, and videos for seven weeks.

Week One is Stamping.
I totally forgot about stamping! 
Remember this piece? Probably not, it's from 2010:

[from the "What If" series of posts]
I stamped with bubble wrap and a bottle cap, and painted on a stencil on a dot print strike-off from work.

Enough history! Get to the stamping! 

On Wednesdays, there is a TDL One Hour Challenge which this week related to the stamping lesson.
Just my cup of tea -- a little creative play date, without a heavy time commitment.
Bonus: this week it's all analog. Deploy the ink and gouache!

I opted for finding six random items to use for stamping, and spending ten minutes stamping with each.
My tools:

Dessicated Lime, Golfball, Cork, Fake Fur, Shoe, Zip Cartridge

I cleared a space on my studio table:

And used the golfball with ink (you can see it resting in the ink puddle above).

In ten minutes, I filled sixteen pages with textures! Very exhilarating!

In my second session with the golfball,  I used ultramarine gouache (which very quickly merged with the leftover ink due to gravity and general sloppiness):

My goal with the gouache was to see what kind of marks I'd get with a more "watercolory" medium.
Eighteen pages generated!

My third session with the goofball golfball was stamping with acrylic paint.
[Trying to find my acrylic paint was no walk in the park. But that's a topic for another post].
The goal was to see if the marks were different with an opaque medium.

Totally forgot how stinky acrylic paint is. Especially 30 year old puff paint. Not very opaque either.

Results, 13 pages:

Mr Lou, my studio assistant, remained unimpressed.

Thirty minutes total with one "tool", forty seven pages of textures = SO much fun!

But I don't think I'm finished yet -- now I want to try the golfball with oil paint, because THAT is truly opaque.
Will add my results if I get to it.