Make Art That Sells Weak 3: Hans Goes Solo

This week's assignment was illustrating the cover or a spread from Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snail and the Rose Tree." A depressing fairy tale and in today's terms it's much like the B side of single that never made it.

First up snail research. The cute thing I learned about snails is that their eyes are on top of the antennas.

I thought about the Rose Tree. Many of the students in the class made them into sweet cute ladies.

We also drew titles and quotes from the story.

Of course, the snail doesn't want to be lame and just grow roses like the tree, he wants to go to the MOON.

See the number 5? That is my 5th attempt at the composition of the sketch.

This remains unfinished..it needs hours and hours of work. To do list:

1. finish the outer space world. 

2. The snails don't match. 

3. Fix the way beavers really cut down trees, like a pencil point.

4. Add some rose vines to the blast off tree or passenger on the snail. 

5. the lady on the left has dark lines and the moon scene has black lines.

After working on that for a WHOLE day, my daughter said she liked this direction better.

Lilla said to create great environments. 

Without any power from the storm, I used my door as a lightbox.

Yes, the boy is zombie creepy and so is the girl. Without the internet and electricity, I could not go to Pinterest and find out what a ballet shoe, raccoon or Sherlock's hat looked like. 

After stealing some power from the neighbors, I made those corrections and I turned this in:

I also did an all pink version.

Is there Hans Christian Anderson the IVth? My apologies to the Anderson family.

Summer School with Lilla Rogers - Weak Too

For Make Art That Sells this week, we designed plates for all of the great stores I like to shop at like Crate&Barrel & Anthropologie. Topic? Plants.

From my photo library I found this interesting ground cover.

I tried pencil. 

Then ink.

A photo of a cut tree stump from downtown that i posterized in photoshop:

From that, I got this:

Not really me. And no, I'd never buy that. So I moved on to creepier plants.

Close, but it still didn't wasn't quite me...and those pattern plates looked like something I'd seen at Target before.

Then I had an AH HA moment. I wanted to create work that that makes you smile.

I turned around in my living room and saw the pictures that i did a LONG TIME AGO hanging over my couch. How would that look on a plate?

I needed to capture that. So I started over AGAIN! 

BOLDER. BETTER LINES:

From that I got this:

I modified the palette to a taupe (thistles are purple) and turned this in as my final.

Think I like the black better.

Summer School with Lilla Rogers - Week Won!

Summer school has started. My class with Lilla Rogers has been great fun. 

On week one, we designed fabric for the quilting market. 

Topics were mushrooms and vintage Pyrex. First I did some research:

These thin purple delicate mushrooms were growing in my neighbor's yard.

Nice try, but I ditched this attempt.

Then I moved on to the dishes. We had this set growing up.

I added words on the bowls to show we used them. Dad still uses yellow for popcorn.

We learned to make repeats to use on fabric.

I decided to go a new direction from another dish we had growing up.

After countless hours, this is the final assignment that I turned in.

Fab Fabric Flowers

Had to do an errand at the fabric warehouse and this caught my eye.

Duh. Should have known is was Kaffe!

Then I looked to see how many colors were used.

I tugged on the fabric a bit. No. Not 8!

FIFTEEN!

Other inspiring things I saw today:

I liked the back side better.

I nice thick chenille:

Fabric below was a really dark brown, not black.

Also Kaufmann.

I don't think these are painted.