'Wellies and Umbrellies' for Spoonflower!

April showers bring May flowers! This week's challenge was to design a fabric to celebrate the trusty rubber boot!

'Wellies and Umbrellies'   ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs.

This concept came easy to me this week. I live in beautiful south Florida and am surrounded by amazing birds year round. I am constantly photographing, drawing and watching birds. (I took the photo's below).

Two sandhill cranes - backyard 

 

An egret with rosette
spoonbills - local pond

Flamingo - Palm Beach Zoo

Ibis - pond

rainy season rainbow - backyard

Egret - backyard photo

 The weather is gorgeous right now but in rainy season the only creatures happy to be in the rain are the birds. 

I decided to incorporate the boots and birds with rain and some fun umbrellas. I was excited to use some of my sketches from my iPad's Adobe Ideas App. I drew some wellies, umbrellas, rain, clouds, flowers and accessories for my characters like the bathing cap, glasses, and hats to give them personality. 

When the drawings were done I imported them Photoshop on my main computer and assembled them with color and pattern in layers, almost like a collage. When my characters were complete I made a repeat of the rain and clouds and added my characters!

Previews will be sized as a fat quarter (21" x 18"). Voting starts Thursday, March 27th, 2014 and continues until Thursday, April 4th, 2014. Please vote!

The 'Robot Project'

©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs

Spoonflower's design for this week...
'should be inspired by scenes from a school science fair.'
Over the years my girls participated in many science fairs… I remember Olivia cooking hot dogs in a homemade oven made out of tin foil and using only the heat of the sun.
Hanna put dye in the water of white flowers to see if the color would wick up the stems and change the color of the flowers (it worked).There were many, many more that I must have blocked out of my memory.
I was thinking, if mom's could have a science fair project, what would I make? The answer was simple, design robots to do my chores! I  thought this concept worked for moms as well as kids, and I went with it.
I started with the graph paper look to make the drawings appear to be in a notebook. Drew tons of robot parts, arms, legs, gears, etc. and assembled my robots in photoshop. When my robots were assembled I put my pattern together and filled the open spaces with spare parts.
Here is 'The Robot Project'...

The 'Robot Project'
©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All rights reserved.' 

Previews are sized as a fat quarter (21" x 18"). Voting starts Thursday, March 20th, 2014, and continues until Thursday, March 27th, 2014. Please Vote!!