Penguin Portraits for Spoonflower!

Yay penguins!
The Spoonflower guru's asked their faithful artists to design a penguin-inspired fabric to 'celebrate our feathered friends from the Southern Hemisphere'!

Penguin Portraits! ©2015 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved. 

This was a fun one… I did a little research on penguins and then started drawing. I had limited time for this design so I wanted to keep it simple. Sometimes it's hard to come up with a concept for a prompt but this was easy for once, I had a clear vision for this design from the start. Clean shapes that were layered using a limited palette, and of course add texture.
I typically come up with a concept and then draw about about 20 versions of each item in black and white (this gives me design options when I'm assembling my icons). I chose my palette in the photoshop phase using only 4 colors (blue, green, orange, pink) with black and white. I have found that limiting the palette helps to give the pattern a balanced look.
I designed each penguin icon, the fish background pattern, the trees and the patterned fish and opened a new file where I assembled the final pattern! Simple!

Voting starts on Thursday, January 8th and continues until the morning of January 15th, 2015! Please vote!!

Gingerbread Village Toile in Spoonflower top 10!

Thank you for voting!

Spoonflower photo of Gingerbread Village Toile.
©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

Spoonflower photo of Winter Toile Fat Quarter Bundle!

 Thanks to all for a wonderful and creative year… Happy New Year!!

Gingerbread Village Toile!

The design theme this week… 'Create a toile de Jouy - style fabric design using a single color on the theme of winter.'
The first part of my research was to look up the definition of Toile de Jouy. These fabrics are described as a 'repeated pattern of a complex pastoral scene', usually printed in red, black or blue.
The concept for this design came from my daughters. They spent an evening with their friends decorating gingerbread houses over Thanksgiving break from university and I used their creations as my inspiration.
I researched and drew sketches of gingerbread houses, trees, deer, etc. When I had my rough sketches I  took a picture of them with my iPad and opened them in the Adobe Ideas app and drew cleaner versions of my sketches in black and white. I opened the PDF in Photoshop where I 'built' my icons in layers and in color. I know there has to be an easier way to do this but I like the hand drawn look that I get from doing it this way.
This design required loads of details in order to give it the traditional Toile feel. Details like the roof tiles, icicles, trees, fences, the deer and their blankets, window details, the bicycle, sleigh and the two fancy ladies, took a lot of extra time. I think I spent about 25+ hours from start to finish on this print!

Gingerbread Village Toile! ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved. 

Previews will be sized as quarter yards (21" x 18"). Voting starts today, December 11th, 2014 and continues until December 18th. Please Vote!!

Kittens in mittens

Spoonflower's design this week is cat-themed, again.
I'm more of a dog person myself, but here it is…

Kittens in mittens on ice!  ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. 

'Kittens in Mittens' is the theme provided so I put my kittens in mittens on skates then put them on a pond in a forrest. I don't know, where would you put them?

Voting starts on Thursday, December 4th, 2014. Please Vote!

Retro thermoses + lunch boxes for Spoonflower!

'Retro thermoses + lunch boxes!' ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. 

The challenge for this week… thermoses! 

     I decided to go with the old school thermos and lunchbox combo and did my research mostly on Pinterest. Many of the Pinterest images have copyrighted icons on them I just used the shapes as reference and added my own icons of old cars, planes and camping themes. The Polar Bear was added just because he makes me happy!

Voting starts on Thursday, November 18, 2014 , and continues until until December 3rd, 2014. Please Vote!