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- Want to know what I’ve ‘bin’ up to lately?!
I have been painting, designing and trying to break into the world of surface pattern design by entering a competition.
Brabantia bins have an open competition to design for the exterior of Brabantia’s bestseller for limited edition production in 2013.
And I just wondered if I could ask for your help if you are willing to give it please.
If you like my design would you visit the link by clicking here on the competition page and give me your vote?

My bin is currently around about page 12 or 13 depending on whether you are looking on a laptop or a larger screen. But it gets moved back as more designs are added.
The competition closes June 10th. Many thank you’s for supporting me
Heres some of the designs I created in Photoshop after painting the abstracted light reflections.
We were given the brief (and template) to create a gift wrap design and also a greetings card.
I designed six patterns but I’m keeping some private for my surface pattern portfolio. And I successfully followed the tutorial for putting them in a technical repeat :0
Have great, long Bank Holiday weekend (if you live in the UK.)
A couple of months a go, as I was clearing up, I happened upon the light shining through this bubbled water-glass. It looked so interesting and the shadow was amazing; I quickly snapped a pic with my iPhone.
I’ve been playing with paints in water-related colours and looking at the shapes this shadow made, with a view to scanning it and manipulating it into a design. I’ll show you tomorrow what came of it

I don’t know why this has amused me as much as it has, but it has. This was a recent workshop for the ABSPD course that I’m taking, on how to Photoshop your designs into a room mock-up. It was a really fiddly exercise but so worth it for the moment when I floated my design across and I suddenly became a wallpaper designer. I was giddy I tell you!
Thank you all for the encouraging comments about the teacup paintings. I so enjoyed coming home from a rather hard day at work to find you were liking what I’d been doing – it picked me right up. Thank you.
I can’t believe that Module 1 of The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design is ending this week. It has been so much fun and I’ve learnt huge amounts and remembered huge amounts from earlier training. We had a technical workshop on how to use the colour picker tool in Photo Shop and how to make colour palates from images.
I am always tearing out sheets from magazines simply because I like the colours and now I’ve found how to use them more constructively because it’s amazing what colours the computer identify’s from places within an image which the naked eye doesn’t register. Anyway I am totally hooked with making these and could do it all day, every day. Now there’s an idea!

Hurray! I learnt how to do colour overlay’s in Photoshop last week and have been having the best fun ever since ‘colouring’ in. The possibilities are endless I tell you!
I don’t think any of these are award-winning wallpaper designs or anything. In fact I found it hard to conjure up colour ideas after designing the pattern in black and white. Luckily I’ve been pinning colours to my Colour Palettes Pinterest board for a while now, so I had a bank of inspiration to go to.
I remember learning to drive and finding steering unexpectedly tricky. Now I jump in the car and co-ordinate all the tasks without even thinking about it. And so it will be with this I’m sure. Off to obsess some more with colour options, placement choices, scaling, repeats, texture…
Thank you to:
for letting me show your work here as my colour inspiration.
Having a great moochy day doing a bit of this and a bit of that… Been playing around cropping, clone stamping, transforming, flipping and rotating and generally just keeping my baby Photoshop skills alive in the old grey matter!
Also been fiddling around making a new Spring inspired blog banner (we can hope) and looking for a knitting pattern to start the scarf in the post below – will you send me a link if you’ve seen one similar as I can’t find one to work from and my knitting fingers are itching!



























