MATS Bootcamp – Jelly!

March has been all about jelly. I found the topic a little less inspiring than last month’s cuckoo clocks, but still ended up having fun with it (despite a crazy ‘other work’ month that saw me with very little design time on my hands). Fortunately, drawing, painting and making pretty patterns are all part of how I relax, so every spare moment I will have my head in a sketchbook, looking at Pinterest for colour inspiration or having a play in Illustrator. I even fill my notebooks and work diary with doodles drawn while waiting for files to upload or computer processes to complete.

The start of the process was the mini – jelly moulds!

I did some sketches:

    And then I played with putting them into Illustrator and colouring them.

I wasn’t hugely excited by what I’d come up with, though.

Then the assignment came and it was bolt fabric. Which meant patterns… Hooray! Patterns are totally my thing. I love, love, love making patterns. But I didn’t have time to really get into it and was thinking about different ideas and not using my motifs from the mini. Then Lilla’s surprise – which was about colour again – came and there was a nougat palette which I felt inspired to play with:

This was definitely feeling a lot better and I was happy with the motifs and the layering and the repeat, but the colour wasn’t quite singing to me. So, then I had a play with neutrals, which was the other part of Lilla’s Week 3 surprise. From what I’ve read about MATS A and MATS B courses, Lilla is very big on having  neutrals in a design.

I played with some (new acrylic) paints:

And then I played in Photoshop (strips of colour, overlaid with strips of translucent (at different opacities) white and black. And then I picked out the colours that really sang to me from this playing.  And came up with this colour palette:

It feels like Spring and Juice and Bouncy Jelly. I love it!

In fact, it occurred to me that the colours were really similar to some flowers I bought the other day:

This is what I submitted:

And here are some other colourways:

(Look at the collection on the main page to see the co-ordinates  in their full glory.)

We’re taking a break for April, as they’re running MATS A and B. This is probably a good thing for me, too, as ABSPD Module 3 starts on Monday, so I’ll be pretty busy with that!

Please contact me if you’re interested in licensing any of the designs on this site, or commissioning new ones.