Halloween prints and creating in collections

This week, I time jumped 7 months into the future and got into the Halloween spirit. 🎃

I know it’s only March, but in the surface design world, we typically need to be working 6-9 months ahead when it comes to seasonal prints. So I put my Halloween cap on and made these sweet candy corn patterns.

I started with just the first candy corn print, but decided to turn these into a mini collection.

Since I started publishing my work to Spoonflower last year, I’ve mainly been creating one-off hero prints. However, many people who sew and make things with fabric like to use a couple of prints that coordinate well with one another.

One of my focuses moving forward is to start creating mini collections around my designs so that my customers have more options for their projects.

I’m looking forward to working in this way because I’m finding it quite fun to put together these coordinating patterns. Because they’re so simple, I can generate a bunch of ideas really quickly. It’s a fun creative workout for my brain.

This week I also learned how to create patterns in Photoshop, which allows me to take my traditional drawings and turn them directly into designs. My current process involves digitizing my work in a way that makes it look much more graphic, but this new process preserves the individual brush strokes and gradients of traditional work.

I took some fruit drawings I made with Micron pens and Copic markers last year and created a few prints with them. I’m currently working on designing a small collection around them and I’ll share more of that with you next week.

Rachel