Frida Kahlo

I got an amazing comment on my last Paisley post, I wanted to honor the beautiful artist Frida Kahlo. I'm deeply touched, thank you. ; Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter best know for her surrealist self-portraits, depicting her intense emotional and physical pain. She was three years old at the onset of the Mexican Revolution, a fact which colored her from the very beginning of her life, including accounts of how her mother would rush her and her three sisters into the house because of outbreaks of gunfire in the streets outside her house. Sometimes her mother would even invite the hungry revolutionaries in for dinner... –Wikipaintings  More here.

Paisley and foulard designs

After creating the different paisleys and bringing them into Illustrator, I had to create a repeat. The spaces in between the paisleys are as important as the paisleys themselves. The second and third images are paisley foulard designs derived from one of the flowers I created. Foulard is a light silk fabric with a distinctive soft finish and a plain or simple twill weave. It is believed to have originated in the Far East. In French the word foulard signifies a silk handkerchief. ; Hand drawn, manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Batik / Cotton (2)

Remember this post about batik in cotton I was working on? This is what I made, a small quilted piece of all the different fabrics I made. I also added some embroidery to see how it will look if I'll choose to make it more textured. I chose the floss colors to be the same as the fabric, I wanted to enhance what I had, not to introduce new colors.

The island continent

Here is what The Island Continent is writing about themselves: what we aim to achieve at The Island Continent is a online digital archive of the Australian image, the colour, nostalgia, fashions, design, the people, the places, the vibe and the humour. In between blog posts of our actual studio work, we dig deep down into the moth balled archive boxes to uncover those lost gems we have collected over the last 30 years, with features on creatives today from the past, some you know and some we want you to know. More here.

Paisley sneak peek

My new assignment is to create a contemporary paisley print with a fresh color story. Here is a sneak peek of the beginning of my new design. ; Hand drawn, manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. ; Paisley is a term in English for a design using the boteh, a droplet-shaped vegetable motif of Persian or Indian origin, but its western name derives from the town of Paisley, in central Scotland, a center for textiles where paisley designs were produced. Such designs became very popular in the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, following imports of post-Mughal versions of the design from British India, especially in the form of Kashmir shawls, and were then imitated locally. The pattern is sometimes called "Persian pickles" by American traditionalists, especially quilt-makers, or "Welsh pears" in Welsh textiles as far back as 1888. –Wikipedia