The Nutcracker for Spoonflower!

Tchaikovsky's most famous ballet was overdue for its own fabric contest so Spoonflower asked it's designers to create a fabric inspired by The Nutcracker for last week's challenge!

A Nutcracker Christmas! © 2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

Voting will close on December 30th, 2014. Happy New Year! Vote Here!

Marching Band for Spoonflower!

Marching Band for Spoonflower! ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved. 

The design contest this week at Spoonflower… celebrating marching bands!

I started this design as I normally would, with research on the internet and Pinterest. The most interesting bits that I found were vintage ads for band uniform catalogues. I took note of the details on the vintage uniforms and decided to incorporate them into my design. I wanted to use certain instruments associated with a marching band and drew them and my marchers in my usual loose fashion on my iPad.

Next, I opened the Adobe Ideas file in Photoshop and chose my color palette. Most of the band images online were using the same theme of red and black uniforms, so I chose a palette that was a little different. The blue and yellow worked well together and the green was a natural for the background.

©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs.
All Rights Reserved.

I wanted the colors of the marchers to reflect a real marching band, so diversity was important. I built the characters in Photoshop and then placed each one in proper marching position on a new 4.5x10.5" file, the idea is to set up for a 1/2 brick layout. I added my green in the background and a dot texture for interest. Finally adding the notes to help with the overall pattern design!

Preview on the 1/2 brick pattern is a quarter yards (21" x 18"). Voting starts on Thursday, September 11th, 2014. Please Vote!

History of Jazz

This week's Spoonflower Design Challenge is 'celebrating the rich history of jazz music'.

I got started by researching on Pinterest. I have a 'vintage graphics + ads' board that has a ton of old Jazz record covers from all of the greats like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington.

'Jazz Groove' ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs
fabric, wallpaper, wall decals and gift wrap available soon at Spoonflower.com

I am such a fan of the design from this era. Most of the album covers and posters were done with a limited color palette to keep printing costs down, so I restricted my pattern to 2-colors and white. The green and blue combined at 50% on top of each other make the background olive color.

The instruments were all drawn on my iPad with the Adobe Ideas App. All of the images were done in black and white, sent to 'the cloud' and then colored in Photoshop on my desktop computer. The details like the pigeons, starbursts, dots, stripes and details on the instruments were done with india ink and a '0' round brush on copy paper. I like the painterly feel the marks give to the finished design. When the ink was dry I scanned the marks and colored them in photoshop as well.

Why the pigeons?
They just felt right!

Some of my favorite old album covers… (from Pinterest)!

Miles Davis,
Newport Jazz Festival, 1958

Miles Davis

Dizzy Gillespie…
Fab illustrations on this one!

"Cal Tjader Quintet" 1956 Fantasy Records 

Dizzy Gillespie

Roy Eldridge, Collates,
Cover by David Stone Martin

Abner Graboff design, 1955,
Pete Jolly Sextet.
From Mid-centuria blog.

Paul Bacon design Blue Note 10
'Mellow The Mood'

Hans Michel + Günther Kieser, 1957

Previews designed as a fat quarter fabric size (21" x 18"). Voting starts Thursday, February 13th, 2014 and continues until Thursday, February 20th, 2014. Please Vote!