Favourite Designer of the Week - Ashley Goldberg

What I love about Ashley Goldberg's pattern and print design is each piece is more like an individual piece of abstract art. 

Weekly Print Doodle

Make it in Design - Summer School, Creative Brief 2

The second trend brief for the Make it in Design summer school is Global Geometric. So as expected they ask not to divulge too much information on the briefs. However this is what I came up with for Global Geometric and I designed with stationary in mind. The first design is what I submitted as you can only submit one print but I made a few more from this print to make a mini collection. 

Weekly Print Doodlee

Top Up Instagram Albums

A year or so ago I made my Instagram photos into albums, you can see how here. It's been a while since I printed any photos so I thought it was about time I topped up my albums.

Drawing and Illustration Class - Week 6

This is the final week of my drawing and illustration class and I'm really going to miss it, in fact I might do another round in a couple of months. If anyone lives in the Leeds area you should defiantly check out 'The Bowery' as well as doing lots of ace workshops and classes they are also a cool cafe and gallery shop. 

So the final week was focused on characters. Below are some of the inspiration work sheets we were given.

 Homework was to bring in something to do with allotments. I brought in a bunch of beetroots (that to be fair were rotting in the bottom of my fridge and not freshly picked off the allotment, but, shhh).

We were encouraged to give our vegetable a character and to draw or part draw that vegetable into that character. Below is my character chart. 

After a while I realised I was describing my friends dad. Seen as it was the last class I decided to have a little fun with it and made a little beetroot family. This was maybe not the best technical drawing I've done and I didn't really have time to finish it but I'm not really about that and more about having a bit of fun with it. I sent my friend my final picture and was a little worried she might be a little, shall we say #creepedout but... she loved it :) she said its her wallpaper on her phone :) Also Sharon (tutor) said she might use it as inspiration as a class with the kids she also does workshops for, I'm pretty sure theres a compliment in there somewhere. Might start thinking about a career designing kids crafts  etc. 

Homework this week was to design the first letter if our name using pattern or illustration. Such as using your hobbies as inspiration etc. So thats what I used as inspiration. I like taking photos, crafting and drawing etc so I used those things to make a letter H. 

Winter Walk

Winter Walk by hatty-crallan featuring white jeans

MANGO cable knit sweater
johnlewis.com

Red coat
£37 - choies.com

Hunter socks
£41 - saksfifthavenue.com

Ally Fashion white jeans
£17 - allyfashion.com

Hunter wellington boots
£90 - mytheresa.com

UGG Australia glove
£100 - bloomingdales.com

River Island hat
£17 - riverisland.com

Weekly Print Doodle

Screen Printing

I did quite a bit of screen printing at uni but haven't done any since. It seemed like to big a challenge to do it at home after having done it in big messy studio for years with all the resources to hand. 

For Christmas I received an a4 screen, some inks, and all the equipment you would need to print at home, but I was still to intimidated to have a go. So I purchased a book called 'Screen Printing at Home' by Karen Lewis and this gave me the confidence to have a go. 

You will need:

A screen printing screen

Or an embroidery hoop with cheese cloth

Paper

Masking tape

Craft knife 

Cutting board 

Screen printing inks 

Plastic spoons 

Squeegee 

Spatula

Plastic cups

Fabric 

Iron 

First of all you need to design or pick a print. Go for something simple, especially at first as you will need to paper cut it out. 

Cut out your image using a craft knife on a cutting board.

Masking tape the your image to the screen making sure there is tape in all the gaps you don't want printing.

Mix your inks to get your desired colours using the plastic cups and spoons.

Using a large clean surface i.e. the kitchen / dinning table, lay a large piece of scrap fabric, such as calico, this creates a softer surface to print on and will hopefully stop lumps and bumps off the label coming up on your print. Make sure the fabric is ironed.

Lay the fabric you wish to print on top of the scrap fabric and also iron it. 

Lay your screen, flush side down onto the fabric.

Spread a decent amount of your mixed ink to the top of the inside of the screen with a spatula. 

Using a firm but not too heavy pressure pull the squeegee down, pulling the ink with it. Go back up the screen with the squeegee and back down again, then carefully lift off the screen and carefully place it back down to create a repeat print. 

Make sure to really clean your screen and all your implements after use, I found this easiest in the shower basin. 

Once the first colour is dry feel free to add another colour, and another and another. 

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, it's not perfect but that's okay, and it wasn't obviously as easy as doing it in a studio, I think cleaning everything was the biggest challenge but I'm chuffed with myself for finally getting around to having a go at it.  

Im thinking next time I move or re decorate, I might attempt to print all my own curtains, duvets, cushions etc. I think I might use a variation of dyeing fabrics, screen printing, fabric block printing, fabric paint, fabric pens and fabric crayons. 

I love all this abstract type bedding and print from urban outfitters, so I think that's what I might try to re create.