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!

Elizabeth Olwen: Vintage Fuchsias

Elizabeth Olwen is a Toronto-based surface designer. Inspired by pastoral beauty, nature in its most playful forms, folklore, and romance, Elizabeth’s work is driven by the desire to leave something beautiful behind with every step she takes. Her work is really awesome, especially her patterns,check out her portfolio here!!

Llew Mejia: Fuchsia Birds

Decided to try something a bit different with this post, and do some Mexican folk art styles. Part of my family lives next to an entire area that is just packed with folk art in Mexico and I feel like it really had an impact on me when I was younger. When I first started drawing a lot of what I did was just freestyle brushstrokes and embellishments, which were inspired by folk art from that area. So this was getting back to my roots of drawing.

I had a lot of fun making this one and it works as a horizontal pattern only, and also as a placed graphic. I decided to include the repeat in black and white. The rest is in color, tried to replicate some older art, love it or leave it.

Lindsay Nohl : Under a microscope

Today's pattern has a little bit of a twist to it. For some reason I was stuck thinking about microscopic organisms all day today. It was just one of those things that stuck in the back of my mind. Do you know when you un-focus your eyes and just stare into space --- then little spots swim across your vision?

I was thinking about those. Those little tiny floaty things.

Then I made this pattern. It's a very pretty flower on it's own and though my first intentions were to show them as they were, in a cluster, I started drawing other things and just went with it.

Natalie Northrup: Hydrangea Stamping

This week we have Natalie Northrup joining us, check out her portfolio as well as other links, she's great!

Natalie is a New York based artist and surface designer currently working at Creatures of Comfort, and used to live in Minneapolis ( she studied with Lindsay!!)  her website is www.natalienorthrup.com  and she collaborates on patterns with the artist Brian Severns (www.brianseverns.com)  under the name Pinholelantern  (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinholelantern). 

Llew Mejia: Hydrangea PJ's

This weeks flower is one of my Ma's favorite flower and we always had heaps of them growing all around our front yard, they are deceiving flowers because I always thought from far away they looked like one large sphere flower, but they are just a cluster of a billion micro flowers.

I got a lil girly on this weeks pattern, wanted to experiment a bit, just did some pencil sketches of the Hydrangea, and tossed them up, confetti stylez. This one I think should be on some kid's pajamas or something of that nature, trying to broaden my range a little bit, hope you all enjoy!

101 Florals : Clusters

Happy Monday! This weekend was a crazy one. For some reason it felt LONG. Really, really long. When I got home from manning the gallery on Saturday night I went to lunds and bought myself some flowers. They weren't Hydrangeas like the ones I've drawn for today's pattern, but a dozen roses. Bright Orange-pink ones. On sale.

Because I deserve them. Then, because I couldn't help myself, I bought roses for everyone else I was going to see that night. Yellow roses, orange roses, pink roses, peach roses. Llew and I once went to a psychic -- (which, now that I think about it, seems like a long time ago) who told me I need to buy flowers for myself more often.

I've remembered that ever since and I've made a point to get myself flowers at least once a month. I wish they lasted longer. I suppose that's why they make silk flowers. So you can have something a little more permanent brightening your day.



Anyway, speaking of permanence. I did this whole pattern with ink and no pencil. Just one group of sketches with a brush pen. Just one whole page of plant parts with no stopping. It was therapeutic. Here they are! Loads and loads of Hydrangeas!