Llew Mejia: Waikiki Kiwis

So this pattern was based off of the Kiwi flower. It's a cool flower all in all, a little bit of a challenge to draw, and I don't really even like kiwi's very much. Feel's like your'e trying to eat a small oval mammal, but first you have to skin it and it's all soft and juicy. It's just kind of unsettling. Anyway back to the pattern, so I wanted to give it a real islander look, some distressing here and there, make it look a little sun-bleached, or even kinda inside out, like a real islander wears his Hawaiian shirt, to distinguish the natives from the Haoles as Natives call outsiders...I just learned about that the other day, pretty good fact. Enjoy!

Simplicity

This weekend was a long one and I am longing for a little simplicity.


So, with all of the stuff that's going on I decided to go a little graphic with this one. I channeled a little Marimekko here -- just one simple bloom repeated.

Ann Shen: Painterly Peony

 Illustrator Ann Shen did a pattern for today, she is great, you should check out her site for more work! I like this because it looks like a vintage tablecloth!

Here is some info about Ann: Ann Shen is an illustrator, designer and writer based in Los Angeles, California. She lives with her talented animator fiance, Ryan, and their animal menagerie including two dogs (Oliver & Bettie) and one kitten (Penny). Her interests include food, fashion, and flea markets.

Llew Mejia: PPPPeonies

Peonies are a cool looking flower, with a million layers in them, they alway have ants and other insects around them for some reason. Maybe they produce a bunch of sugar,to attract ants and aphids. Either way I tried to do a simpler style using just one line weight and on a separate layer building the shading up with a brush Copic marker, the shading didn't turn out exactly how I wanted but it's all good. There you have it!

Kevin Stanton: Paper Cut Rafflesia

Kevin Stanton joined us this week, he is a real talented illustrator who works in a lot of cut paper, which is completely insane to me because it seems like my hand would just cramp up and die. But any who, heres a line of info on Kevin, he is a freelance illustrator with a green thumb, an interest in knowledge gathering, and an exacto knife. You should all check out his site for more work!!

Llew Mejia: Rotten Rafflesia

This weeks awesome flower is one of my personal favorites of all time, it's the stanky Rafflesia, also known commonly as the corpse flower due to the foul odor it produces. It's a really strange flower too, considering that it has no stems or leaves or even roots. The plant lives like a parasite off of a host vine on the ground floor of the rainforest. The vine feeds the massive four-petaled flower (sometimes weighing in at a massive 22 lbs!) and the flower propagates by small mammals and insects.

This plant is the largest single flower plant in the entire world.Was trying to give this pattern a sort of Hawaiian shirt color way hope it comes across! For all you Pokemon fans out there, the infamous Vileplume is based off the Rafflesia. You know you've made it as a plant when they make a Pokemon after you....dayum.

On a white ground

I wanted to do something a little simple this time - something with a white ground.
This time it's a mixture of flowers with a tiny bit of texture.

I was thinking about blind contour drawings tonight and how interesting things look when you allow shapes to connect. So, there you have it! These flowers look as if they were made with a piece of spaghetti -- one continuous line.

Kyle Fewell: Floating Thistles

Here's a bit of info on Kyle, he's great and does a bunch of editorial work, he is also the first male person besides myself to do 101Florals haha anyway.

He is a New York based illustrator. Who graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Illustration. He likes cats, video games and death metal.

Check out his portfolio and awesome work here!

Llew Mejia: First Snow

 So this weeks floral is the infamous Burdock Thistle, I think at one time or another anyone who has gone into high grass has come out with at least one of these attached to their fleece or their shoelaces. It's an annoying way to self-propagate but the plant has burs all over it to attach itself to animals fur originally, in human's case it's our clothes. Usually we encounter these when they're dry so they don't appear as colorful pink tufts in a sea of greens, which they look like before they dry out for the winter.

I was inspired to do another all illustrator piece to practice a little more. I did it all in one go and looking back now it looks kind of stretched but o well. It's supposed to look like a first snow when everything else starts dying and these thistles stick out!

Late night pattern making.

Well, I cranked this one out a little late tonight. Things have been ridiculous at work(s). We've got a million deadlines and a million more projects going on. They're all really exciting, but man, when it rains, it pours. I was up late tonight working on my piece for an upcoming exhibition and trying to help Chris get a bunch of holiday cards done for one of my clients.

The color palette for my pattern tonight comes from all of the weird drinks I've been trying over the last day or two. I went to Whole Foods and bought some probiotic vegetable drinks, some chia seed drinks, and some other weird flower essences. Most of those drinks are green, but there was one beet and ginger flavored drink that I snuck in there that was a bright magenta.

I also was trying something a little looser tonight. I've got this brush pen that I've been playing with that runs out of ink pretty quickly, but I like the texture it's got and I keep using it. Ah, those happy mistakes.

Natalya Zahn: Bells and Bats

As a specialist in animal and natural/scientific illustration, it was important to me to incorporate a critter of some sort into this floral project. Pollinators were an obvious place to start, and the more I researched, the more I became fascinated with BATS! The flowers that lend themselves to bat pollination (aka chiropterophily) are generally large, showy, often bell-shaped, and bloom pale or white blossoms - at night! The bats readily duck into them to sip nectar, dusting themselves with pollen in the process. How cool is that?! The flowers featured here are aptly named Cathedral Bells, and the use of a restricted/muted palette I think does a swell job at conveying a sense of dusk or nighttime… I'm hoping the concept of bats and big beautiful flowers inspires and encourages people to learn a bit more about these amazing, gentle, and extremely beneficial little flying mammals.

More of my natural and animal illustration can be found here: www.natalya.com (portfolio); www.iheartungulates.com (naturalist's blog); www.oscaratemymuffin.com (the blog of my very own beast, Oscar).

Llew Mejia: Cartoony Cathedral Bells

This flower is really awesome looking, besides being called Cathedral Bells they are also called Cup and Saucer flowers. Pretty cool although mine don't really look like tea cups.

 At first I didn't really know how to go about it, whether to draw it more realistic or cartoony. I watched some Ren & Stimpy and it inspired this color palette along with one of my favorite fabric designers of all time Josef Frank. Together this is their weird pattern bastard child, it could look nice printed on some fabric I think, or even some old ladies dress, (Alyssa suggested the latter.)

 Well, enjoy the psychedelic color ways...

Good intentions and big ambitions.

Huge apologies from me on not getting my flower up today!
Here I was with good intentions and big ambitions, but this week is particularly crazy.
For those of you that have an interest in hearing my excuses, I won't bore you, but I will say there are some weeks that having so many jobs is really hard!

I'll make it up to you soon. The next one I do will be fantastic! Thanks for understanding and I can't wait to see what happens with the rest of the posts this week!