Hello! I would like to invite you to an exciting PIN-HOP! What’s that, you ask? Let me explain it to you!

Recently my fabulous design group got together and discussed how to keep the idea of a blog hop, but make it easier and quicker to find your favorite designers. The answer was, of course, a pin-hop on Pinterest! A big shout out to Tina Olsson of FYLLAYTA for organizing the artists, all done via email and group posts, we are from all over the world!

On Saturday, June 15, close to 50 designers will ‘pin’ their best interpretations of 4 different themes (from an A/W 13-14 brief by Patternbank.com) to a unique board on Pinterest.
Once on the board, you will see one pattern per designer. If you like a particular pattern and want to see more designs by that artist, just click on their pattern and then link to their website/blog/portfolio. On Pinterest you can also leave comments, share, like, and save to your own favorites. Perfect for all visual artists! One of the many designers participating in this pin-hop is the super talented Suzanne Washington of Suzy Spellbound! Be sure to find her on the pin-hop, and check out her fab work!

The link to the Find New Designers Pin-Hop board which goes live on June 15, is: http://pinterest.com/fndnewdesigners/pin-hop-june-2013

I hope you can make it! For now, I present the “Lookalike Laces” theme by Patternbank which inspired my collection of  patterns….

I chose this theme because my natural drawing style generally leans toward lacy, complicated motifs, Indian Henna designs, and tattoo-style art as well.

These are the colors that I chose. I always do a color test to see how each color bounces off the others. Saves me time in the long run.

This is my main pattern for the collection, “Gypsy Lace”.

I fiddled with the colors a lot on this one!

This is a page from one of my sketchbooks. I sketch A LOT. It’s always a good thing to do, you learn tons through the process, and sometimes come up with completely different ideas than you originally started out with.

This whole group came out a tad brighter than I originally intended. Oh well! Hehe! This one I called “Gypsy Dreams”.

This one is “Gypsy Fantasy”. I need to play with this one a bit to “up” the contrast.

I am very attracted to mandalas, love drawing them!! This is hand drawn and scanned in to Adobe Illustrator where I made the pattern repeat.

I love this design, I really must do more two color patterns! I’m kind of hooked on “ogee” patterns right now…

I took a class at The Rhode Island School of Design, and learned tons about Photoshop, so I thought I would add some textural layering techniques that I learned that I felt went with this theme.

Love the distressed look in this one! Burn out and stencil technique.

Here’s my ikat design.

Also, I HAD to do some mock-ups. So much fun to make these!!