La La La Leopard

Did March sneak in like a leopard for you? How did that happen? Celebrate by adding some feline spots to your day.

1. Armless club chair, LA Contempo, $199
2. Little Giraffe fake fur throw, Layla Grayce, $192
3. Elizabeth and James ltd ed sunglasses, Shopbop, $185
4. Fake fur iPhone cover, Mini in the Box, $3.39
5. Vince Camuto mixed metal bracelet, Macy's, $98
6. Chooka rubber boot, Shoes.com, $67.15
7. Sally Hanson Kitty Kitty nail strips, Sears, $9
8. Wall plate, Home Depot, $12

This was my pitch for a weekly guest post on a very cool blog. I didn't get the gig >sad face< but why waste the post? Later on today or tomorrow I'll do a demo on how I do leopard-type prints at work.

Almost one month later...
Yeah. Thank goodness my "demo on how I do leopard-type prints" isn't a life-or-death situation. It'll happen... eventually... don't hold your breath!!!!

Pattern Recognition II

I just decided yesterday --
I'm exhibiting pattern-themed art in April!

something about seeing these two pieces together cemented the idea

mr chu says: what took you so long to come to your senses?

My last show like this was in 2009.
TAG Gallery,  2525 Michigan Avenue, D-3,
(Bergamot Station), Santa Monica, CA 90404

Stay tuned for developments...

The 18 hour Paisley

I worked on this paisley for 3 days.
Here are some of the steps I went through to get it into repeat.

the original "art" from the client

had to reduce it to B+W first, worked in photoshop (psd)

considered completing paisley by hand drawing
got this far and nixed the notion
I can draw nicer shapes with the pen tool in ai

straightened it out using skew transformation

mirrored the elements
I then took it all into Illustrator (ai) and Live Traced

here are elements that I pulled to make custom ai brushes

here are all the brushes in ai

working out the repeat

it's all little bits of vectors from the Live Tracing
big file!

repeat done

I then exported it to psd
and brought back into ai
re-Live Traced
to make it a nice simplified flat file

adjusted colors to beige + grey

finally done

celebrated with chocolate truffles