Surface Patterns for Hot Summer Days
This July has been wonderful in Finland. I have enjoyed gardening and photographing and it shows in my art journal too.
Both the wildflowers and flowers in the garden look great with a dark background. So when I made the drawing with colored pencils, I added some shadows too. Great way to express sunshine is to combine black with yellow!
But my main focus was on summer fabrics. It is so much fun to design prints for summer dresses.
The collage of the left is an old one. A sketch for a surface pattern made in 2011. It was made by cutting circles from handdecorated papers. This time I replicated the design by cutting circles from stamped papers.
The summery prints are mostly made by stamping here. Paper scraps like old scrapbooking papers can be altered easily with markers, colored pencils and stamps. I always try to add subtle color variation in the background to keep the result interesting. Thinking about shadows help here too.
As you can see, my colored pencils are always with me! Hopefully your summer has been as wonderful as mine!
Fun Designs from Decorative Papers
Were you ready for the color bomb? I just could not resist creating this design with the vibrancy that is almost inappropriate. Hopefully, you are like me and need to get your overdose of colors and patterns now and then!
Collage Elements
I have created this surface pattern from handmade collage elements. I often mention how I create single decorative elements which I use in collage art or art journaling later. This time, I made a pattern that is based on those odd elements. These elements are like mini collages. They were made by cutting handmade decorated papers and adding some doodling with markers.
The elements might look complicated but are super simple to make:
1) Combine few paper pieces.
2) Add details with markers.
3) Cut the combined piece in half.
4) Repeat the previous steps changing some of the pieces as you go.
Cutting and combining the cut pieces repetitively is fun, and the result is like a mini quilt. Especially if you add seams with markers like I have done.
Surface Pattern
When creating a surface pattern, you also need something in the background unless you will put the elements tightly together. I wanted to add the background to make the design more interesting. The plain black background was something that I considered first. But it looked too separate from the pieces.
Luckily I save all kinds of doodles, even the ugly ones. I found a file called “blue mess,” a scanned image of the paper which I made a long time ago.
At the time I had thought this doodle was horrible, but now it would be just fine!
I processed my scanned images at Photoshop image processing software. At Photoshop I created a solid colored background, added the blue mess as the second layer and changed its color. Then I removed the white background from each of the four decorative elements and added a stroke to each element.
The repeat was created so that one decorative element is in the middle, two at sides and the fourth one at the corners. It takes some accuracy to place the elements so that they match when the design is repeated. It would have been easier to have each element separate, but I wanted to create a sort of appliqued look.
If you do not make a commercial pattern, you can just create an artwork manually instead of composing a repeatable pattern on the computer.
Here’s the design again, with more muted colors. This design reminds me of an old quilt, colors faded a bit unevenly but still suitable to be the centerpiece of any room.
I call this pattern Kira.
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5 Reasons to Enjoy Cutting Paper with Scissors
I wrote an article about cutting paper with scissors to the Finnish paper crafting magazine “Paperilla.” The collage shown here was made as an illustration for the article. It is called Fruit Tree. For the collage, I picked some solid colored papers and cut them to pieces. After glueing the pieces, I added a black background and thin decorative lines with black markers. So simple yet effective!
I have nothing against die cutting machines but still – think about the possibilities of plain old scissors! It is like all the stencils and cutting files of the world are packed inside of them!
There are at least five reasons to enjoy cutting paper with scissors!
1) Hand cut pieces are 100 % You
People often worry that if they cut by hand, their circles are not perfectly round or their squares perfectly rectangular. I like to call my irregular cuts “organic.” To me, they look unique and full of potential, especially when combined with the other imperfect ones. They are a little bit like my plants – marigolds and geraniums which I grow each year. They might bloom a bit late, and they would not probably be accepted by the finest of the garden centres, but I love them.
2) While hand cutting Your subconscious guides You
When you keep on cutting those odd shapes, your imagination begins to work. Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes more, but when that happens it is like reading an interesting book, like taking a personality test … It is so much fun to find out what those scissors reveal each time!
3) You can repeat Your favorite shapes
Here are the six examples of mine! I have cut them so many time that they come out naturally. I also know a lot of ways to use them. Because of their familiarity, I can easily make variations from them. Finding your favorite shapes can even create the base of your unique style.
I also love to decorate the shapes with some doodling. That makes similar shapes look different from each other.
4) You can use Your own papers – or any papers!
As you know I love to make my own decorated papers. They are often as curvy and irregular as my hand cuts but no worry. With scissors I can cut any paper, thick or thin. I can spend time with fabulous papers or make even the ugly papers fabulous when I cut them thoughtfully. (The papers seen here are the best solids I know – my own watercolored papers where I have used several layers of watercolor to increase the color intensity. There’s gel medium in the jar for glueing the pieces.)
5) You can always think about hand cutting
You can take couple sheets of paper and the scissors with you wherever you go. Or you can just take the scissors and re-use paper from the magazines, tickets, leaflets, etc. Furthermore, I promise, you will begin to see interesting shapes everywhere. (Feel free to copy that crocus shape – a long stem with an oval shape on the top!)
6) Bonus! You are one step closer to being an artist!
Just wait, your art journal, card collection or whatever you do with the hand cut shapes will begin to live and breathe. Just keep on adding those elements!
Think about how this spread would look if I had cut the shapes using a die-cut machine. Nothing alike! Without even mentioning the differences in the experience of cutting and assembling. Art needs freedom, and your scissors can take you there!
Create more hand-cut collage art: Buy Doodled Luxury!
Decorated Papers for Knitters (or wannabe ones!)
I often get drawing ideas from crafting. I made this decorated paper by mimicking the way I knit with many colors.
Stranded knitting (or fair isle knitting as some call the technique) can feel tedious at first. Constantly changing the colors can be tiresome. But if you do that long enough, your brain will get used to it. I think it is a way of thinking: constanty interrupting what you are currently making. If you do that, you will also prevent yourself thinking too far ahead and too logically.
I began with an odd paper that had been watercolored throughout. That way I created depth instead of showing white paper between the colored areas. Color pencils work great on watercolored surfaces a long as the paper is fairly smooth. I created the paper just by adding basic shapes so that they formed some kind of fairly free grid. Changing colors and plans all the time kept the interest at the work and prevented too monotone visual appearance.
After making that paper I began to think about handdyed fiber. I love this photo of my bobbins! It’s mind-blowing when I think about spinning handdyed wool and how the color changes so seamlessly.
I also often knit socks from handdyed yarn. Like these ones I just made recently.
As a result I decided that the irregular stripes deserve to get on paper too!
I began with few colors first, again on watercolored paper.
Then I added colors. I worked pretty fast here. Even if I like my papers to be super detailed the sharp and regular stripes often look too static.
Most of my papers have round shapes. These knitting inspired ones are edgier in style. They will look great when combined with the circles. When you are building the stash of hand decorated papers for collage art, take care that you have a variety of papers.
In these papers the motif size can also be maintained fairly small. So these will look absolutely gorgeous even when cut in tiny pieces!
P.S. I you are more of a quilter than knitter, read what you can bring to art from quilting.
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