What I’m Up To

I actually finished my Granville but I haven’t gotten any pictures yet.  I could have gotten some yesterday, I guess, but we have workers working on our (one and only) bathroom and I had a stomach bug.  (And that combination is a special kind of awful right there.) Pictures next week.

Otherwise, I’ve been trying to get back to drawing and painting.  And also Illustrator.  I used to be pretty happy with my drawing skills but I haven’t been practicing and it shows.  I wasn’t exactly successful at first but then, Spoonflower came up with a challenge.  Everyday for 15 days, they give a design prompt.  Then, you’re supposed to create a fabric from that.  I’ve been working on that everyday.  I haven’t been able to create a full design everyday but that little bit that I do is something, right?  I need to remember that when I can’t get my hand to draw how I want.  And I need to remember it when I struggle with Gimp and Illustrator.  A little bit everyday, right?

So here’s what I did everyday.

Day 1: Pencil drawing.  I did draw but it was frustrating.  I didn’t manage anything I liked.

Day 2: Watercolor.  Now, that was fun! I made this thinking that stripes would be easier to arrange in a repeat.  When I finally get this uploaded, I’ll “only” have to work on getting the stripes to blend together vertically.

Day 3: Abstract.  I doodled! I used to do these when I was bored in class.  They’re very realxing.

Day 4: Block prints. I didn’t have the supplies and didn’t want to use a potato.  Eraser to the rescue!  And the girls’ inkpads.  And that’s another one that I want to get uploaded to play get frustrated learn with.

Day 5: Pen and ink.  That one was just as frustrating as day 1.  I worked on it a few times during the day but it just wouldn’t come together.

Day 6: Geometric.  This is the one that had me struggling with Illustrator.  All I wanted was a grid of equilateral triangles to color in.  I spent 2 hours to get this (the missing lines on the left side shouldn’t cause a problem once the whole thing is repeated).  Originally, I was going to use a picture to decide on a color palette but it took me so long to just get the grid done that I had to stop there.

Day 7: Vector. I didn’t have enough time to really work on this one but I messed around with Illustrator so it counts, right?

Day 8: Photographic.  I so wanted to do something like the examples in the prompt! I wanted to play with that picture of the tree from Monday.  The one with the beautiful light.  I couldn’t figure out anything with Gimp and ended up working on this macro knit picture instead.  It’s seamless at least? (That’s a handy feature in Gimp. It won’t always give the kind of results I want but here, it did a decent enough job.)

Day 9: Open Source. That was yesterday and I had finished the blouse so I took all morning to work on this one.  I used Canva and chose this 9 dot layout where you can add pictures.  There were some stock images available for free but I ended up uploading my own.

I’m looking forward to completing the rest of the challenge and hopefully keeping it up afterwards.  I want to get better and that means practice, right.  Also looking forward to kicking the stomach bug and having a fully functional bathroom again…

About deuxsouriceaux

Creative mommy at home to two wonderful little girls, trying to juggle family, sewing, exercise, family, knitting, photography, and did I mention family?