Paint to Pattern 2023, and How I Got Here
This time last year, September 2022, both my kids started attending day care full time for the first time ever. We’d just moved into a house a few months earlier and had gotten almost everything unpacked, including my sewing room. After having sewn clothes for me and my kids for four years, I wanted to figure out how to start selling some of my work. I thought about making dresses for little girls in linen and cotton, classic styles possibly with a ruffle here or there, but with funky embroidered elements. I’ve not seen anything like it and it seemed unique enough to warrant a handmade price tag. So I started embroidering and seeking out entrepreneurial resources. I enjoyed the embroidery, but it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to make and sell dresses at a scale that would make it worth the time and effort. So I thought about an embroidery business – maybe I could sell embroidery patterns so that people could embellish their own clothes with my designs. I could do online sales, but pre-printed patterns on water soluble stabilizer would also work well in local craft stores and fairs. Maybe I’d even try to teach classes and cultivate a local community of embroiderers. But I’d need to feel confident drawing first…
I’ve always been into arts and crafts, but have never felt confident about my own creative abilities. I can happily and confidently follow someone else’s directions, or paint circles, or blend colors to make an ombre, or some other rote “artistic” activity, but creating something that’s my own expression has never come naturally to me. Embroidery patterns – usually doodly line drawings – seemed like a reasonable goal that I could force myself to do. People like flowers, and I can doodle a flower. And I was really envisioning more graphic patterns anyway – repeats of geometric designs or simple motifs with bold color choices.
Left to right: Happy Bee pattern by Clever Poppy completed Sept 2023, my take on a stitch sampler, a draft plan of seasonal collections I might make, including fabric colors and embroidery patterns
I commandeered the kids’ tablet, bought a stylus, and downloaded Procreate. And then of course the kids started bringing home daycare illnesses and passing them around to us, and by the time one virus had made it to the last of us, one of the kids had started a new round of sniffles or stomach problems. Then we moved into holiday season with gift-making and events and travel. I actually did three days of @ellolovely’s doodle-a-day challenge at the start of the new year before deciding it was pointless, possibly because I had no idea what I as doing or possibly because I’d started getting a flulike sickness that knocked me out for two weeks. And when it seemed like I might live to see the other side of it, my husband got laid off from his job and we quickly decided to see it as an opportunity to move to Europe. He had a job lined up in Paris by mid-February and we could breathe a bit easier, except that meant it was time to figure out how to sell the house, pack up, and move by June.
I was still eager to start my art, which mostly meant getting comfortable doodling and using Procreate, but I took until March to finish a large pile of sewing WIPs before we moved and before starting a new hobby. In the meantime, I’d been listening to Craft Industry Alliance podcast interviews with creative entrepreneurs and Margo Tantau’s Windowsill Chats podcast. I’d also joined Margo’s Patreon group and was very excited about the March monthly art challenge around the theme of “stitches.” It felt made for me. So I turned my kid’s colored pencil drawing into a quilted panel. I was, and am!, so proud of this panel that I made over the course of a week in between cleaning and packing up our house for showings. That week nearly killed me, but I’m so glad I forced this art project in because this is the first thing I made that I felt was genuinely a creative process, even if it used someone else’s art.
Three days of @ellolovey’s Doodle a Day challenge; the dinosaur panel was made by tracing each color of the drawing into a different layer in Procreate, printing each out on water soluble stabilizer, and then recreating them all together using free motion embroidery on a quilted cotton panel.
In April, I started digging into Procreate at the very beginning, just watching Procreate’s Beginner Series. It’s good for showing off some of the functionality of the program and making you marvel at yourself (a total idiot) for making (copying) such impressive little projects, but offers little useful instruction for someone in my situation. So I tried Liz Kohler Brown’s Procreate Foundations, which was much better and made me feel like I could start figuring things out on my own.
So I joined a daily flower challenge, for which the first day’s assignment was to draw a flower growing out of a vessel. I’d learned about gathering reference images so I came up with a concept – a dandelion coming out of a brick – and started from what seemed like a good place. Then despite my use of sketching preliminary shapes and ample use of layers, the drawing just looked irreparably awful.
My first few goes at digital art, based on online tutorials
Shortly thereafter I revisited an old idea I’d had about studying graphic design. If what I was really looking for was some flexible way of generating some income, freelance graphic design seemed like a reasonable route. I found that CalArts has a certificate program on Coursera that spans about six months and struck me as quite rigorous, so I enthusiastically joined. The first project is to create ten images of a household item, and I got stuck again because while I could turn half an apple into a stamp or cynically scribble something that conveyed “apple,” that’s just not the level of seriousness I intended to bring to the program. It looked like I really needed to learn some basic drawing skills before I’d be able to move forward with my artistic interests. I thought about the possibility of looking for something akin to intro classes for a BFA, if not an actual BFA.
May was spent clearing out our house after the sale and making plans for our move. Also deciding I needed to start a new quilt project so that I could hand quilt it while relaxing in Parisian parks, watching the girls chase pigeons. We moved to Paris at the beginning of June, bags of pre-cut quilt bits in tow, and four days later I discovered Sarah Watts’ Sketchbook Squad. Luckily, I’d gotten far enough back in the archives to hear her episode of Windowsill Chats, and was fully convinced by that interview that I needed to take her Paint to Pattern workshop in the fall, despite feeling ridiculous about thinking so. I’ve loved the Ruby Star Society fabrics and the joy with which they’re delivered to the quilting community and with which they're collected and used, so Sarah struck me as a celebrity, but one with a relatable backstory, and also who was offering the exact thing I was looking for – a bank of instructional drawing videos that are organized towards a coherent goal. We were still living in an Airbnb at the time, so I waited until I had more stability and childcare before starting in earnest.
The girls started camp exactly a week before Sarah Watts’ 5-day Photoshop Challenge began in mid-July and I was PUMPED to do it. I colored a little flower with kid markers onto some paper, loaded that bad boy into Photoshop and went wild. I felt like a super hero by the end of the challenge and the experience totally validated my wanting to take her larger Paint to Pattern course in the fall, but it took until the beginning of August for me to share my work with my husband and tell him about the course (and the $1200 price tag). When he learned, he pushed me to sign up and started looking into the materials list to make me make sure I was ready. I finally had to get started making art so I’d have something to work with for the course.
For Sarah Watts Photoshop Challenge, I drew this flower using my kids markers, scanned it into PS, cleaned it up, turned it into a repeat pattern, and used her mockup file to create the shoes.
August has been my month! I needed a starting point and found Heather Ross’ Drawing and Illustration Basics course on Creativebug and worked through that. This was the start of my sketchbook. I also started working through the Foundations videos in Sarah’s Sketchbook Squad and have even just gone outside to sit and draw. I’m also very eager to work in gouache and have purchased a pile of Domestika courses on the topic. I started Cagla Zimmerman’s this week. So far I’ve started making color swatches with my acrylic gouache and am still unsure how you’re supposed to use the paints while racing the clock against them drying out on the palette and ruining paint brushes. It seems like the sort of thing that could drive me to traditional gouache if I don’t get comfortable with it soon.
Sketches from August and September 2023, following along in Heather Ross’ Creativebug class, Sarah Watts’ Sketchbook Squad Foundations videos, and just going outside
First day of school, September 2023
People say you need to make a bunch of work in order to suss out your personal artistic “style.” So I’m in the early stages of that. I sat petrified in front of my sketchbook for probably half an hour today before trying gesture drawing for the first time. I have grand plans for sharing regularly on social media. This is my new website. The girls started school again this week and I’m starting Paint to Pattern. I’m getting there. We’ll see how it goes!