Today is the first day of @elleluna’s #the100dayproject and I’ve finally decided what I’m going to do this year.
I participated for the first time in 2016, drawing one nude woman a day which turned into my Lines + Curves series of drawings that I made into prints, coloring cards and phone cases.
In 2107 I upped my game and did my own #365accordionproject and drew every day in a Moleskine Japanese Album with the goal of drawing every day and continuing from one sketchbook to the next creating one long drawing throughout 2017. I filled 5 1/2 sketchbooks by the end of the year.
For the 2018 100 day project, I’ve been making a long list of possibilities and narrowed it down to two that I’ve been debating for the past couple of days. It was between 100 days of repeat patterns and 100 days of drawings on the iPad.
You may not know that I studied fibers in grad school at the Savannah College of Art & Design (@scaddotedu). And although my focus was on more free-form surface design and mixed media fabric pieces, I also learned how to create repeat patterns and created a handful of fabrics that I screen printed and block printed myself. But I haven’t really done any pattern design since 1993, when I finished grad school.
I draw patterns all the time, as you can see in the drawings in this post, but I haven’t made them repeat. I would like to make some of my designs into fabric and wallpaper, so I want to relearn how to do repeats. When I did it 25 years ago, it was on paper with a lot of cutting, taping and redrawing. It’s much easier these days with Illustrator and Photoshop, but I’ve never really done it that way. I have made some simple patterns in Photoshop for website backgrounds, but nothing fancy.
For this 100 day project, I’m going to do a pattern a day! Mostly I will take elements from ink drawings that I have already done and turn them into repeat patterns, but I’m also wanting to get better at drawing with the Apple Pencil on the iPad, so I hope to do some new drawings that way to throw in the mix.