Surface Pattern Design and Adobe

I am currently working very hard to update my old school art and design skills, both in continuing to practice and refine by classic art skills from my high school art and honors art classes, and my my college art and design classes with physical media, and by learning how to digitize and create finished pieces in Adobe Photoshop. My oldest published art on Spoonflower and Redbubble is the result of trial and error, a lot of mistakes and flailing around, and a great deal of angst. My most recent Spoonflower collection is the Vibrant Wild collection using watercolor motifs that I brought into Photoshop and with which I am still experimenting. I’ve recently pulled down most of my designs on RedBubble so I can rework old designs or create entirely new ones. I’ve been gradually adding little designs here and there.

New Schooling for Old School Art

I was thrilled to have found Bonnie Christine and her Flourish Community in 2021 for some terrific education and support for being a Surface Pattern Designer. In 2022 I took her course for Surface Design using Adobe Illustrator. While I loved it at the time and it really opened up my understanding of the modern way of creating an art business and thinking about art in collections, I’ve come to realize that my art style works better in a raster program like Photoshop, or Procreate. I prefer to make analog art or art elements, and I like to keep the texture and look of it when I bring it into a digital program for finishing. While it’s possible I’ll explore Illustrator again at some point, for now I no longer use it.

Likewise, I am *beyond* thrilled to have found Sarah Watts and her fantastic Team Watts, and in 2022 I signed up for both her From Paint to Pattern course and her School for Misfit Makers community for fantastic education and support for Surface Pattern Design using Adobe Photoshop. I took it again in 2023, and in 2024 I was honored and thrilled to be an Alumni Mentor for the From Paint to Pattern: Taming the Pixel Dragon class of 2024! It was so great to be able to assist and cheer on students and appreciate just how much I’ve learned and continue to learn from Sarah Watts and her fantastic team over the last few years. As I’ve continued to practice my sketchbook practice and bring art in to Photoshop to see what I can do there, I’ve become a real fan of Photoshop as a way to bring my art to a more finished state for potential professional work. I have learned so much about using Photoshop to edit and also to put together art, and yet I feel there is still so much more I can learn with that!

In 2023 in was delighted to discover Mike Lowery and his Getting Paid to Draw illustration course, which has really given me a pathway to combine old school art skills with a new way to use them and think about them. I’ve taken his course twice now, partly because I enjoy his roster of guest artists, and his curriculum has been one that remains current and relevant to developing and maintaining an art practice. Also - Mike is a very entertaining person and teacher!

In the Fall of 2023 I signed up for Stacie Bloomfield’s Leverage Your Art course (she is THE Gingiber lady! Gingiber is a fabric designer well-loved by quilters), and it motivated me to want to take my art out into the world more. What I came to see when I started in on her course is that I really just need to build my art portfolio!

If you’ve come to the end of this page - thank you for visiting my website and reading this far!