Hi First name / friend! Hello, hello! Melody here. Today I’m going to share a little peek into my art process. Back in August of 2022, I created a landscape print for the first time, and I saved a bunch of different iterations along the way, thinking it could be fun to share later. This print became part of my Rise and Shine group that was announced this summer, and will hit shops sometime soon. This is one of my favorite prints I’ve made in a long time, not only because it was a new style of art for me, but because it was like putting together a big puzzle, and I really enjoyed the process. |
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I usually start my collections with a mood board. Now, I am not a mood board savant like my friend Rashida Coleman-Hale. My mood boards are not works of art all on their own, and I hear no angels singing when I look at them. (Have you SEEN Rashida’s mood boards?) I just like mine to be… functional. I collect images (usually on Pinterest) until I feel that tingly sense of inspiration that makes me want to get started on a piece of my own art. |
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In this case, it was the vintage Renault ad that first caught my attention. I loved the flattened, disproportionate landscape, the lush color, and the strong 60’s vibes. That, combined with a few other 60’s/70’s landscapes and artworks created the spark for me to attempt my own stylized landscape. |
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This was my first attempt, and was designed entirely in Photoshop. The image inside the blue rectangle is my artboard, and the area around it is how the art repeats (which means the left edge connects to the right edge, and the top and bottom edges also connect so the artwork keeps going without any breaks in the pattern.) I wanted to create layers in my landscape that contained both the earth and the sky, and I added some overlapping leaves like The Jungle Book cover from my inspo board. I worked really hard here, but at the end of the day, this version did very little to scratch my creative itch. While I couldn’t exactly see the finished art in my head, I knew how I wanted it to make me feel. I just wasn’t feeling it yet. I think this is an interesting moment, because if it was earlier in my career I would have thought “oh well, I tried. I just couldn’t make something as exciting as I’d hoped.” And I probably would have left it there. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this is what the beginning of the process sometimes looks like. I’m not totally happy with what I’ve done, but I also know I’m just getting started. I have no idea how this will turn out, but if I keep working on it, some interesting things will happen. I just have to put in the time. |
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This was my second version a week later. I completely changed the color and added a big sun and a pointy yellow mountain. I also dropped in some playful flowers, cherries, and a palm tree from my illustration archives (I have a big folder of motifs I’ve drawn and categorized so that I can add them to my designs later.) I also got rid of the fern fronds and filled in one of the mountain shapes with leafy vines. |
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I waited a couple more days and came back fresh to see what was most asking for my attention. I decided to soften the shapes in the landscape and get rid of the illustrations that weren’t helping. Then I drew some delicate flowers and vines, wondering if that would add anything interesting to the print. (I ended up kicking those out too but I later made them into their own repeat that I might use in the future). |
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…I’ll just hold onto this. |
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Out with the vines and in with some sprigs! (or are they trees??) |
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Then I added some larger flowers and leaves, some mushrooms, and a bunch of busy stuff. |
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Too busy… back to the drawing board! I still didn’t like how the elements were playing together so I got rid of most of the decorative stuff. Then I focused on the backgrounds and added geometric and linear patterns to the sky and the hills in the landscape. Look at how that space is filling out! This was starting to sing to me. |
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Now we’re talking! I layered some decorative elements in varying scales on top of those geometric and linear designs, and everything started coming together. This was the energy I’d been waiting for. I felt really happy with the balance of all of the elements in the print, but then I realized there was one problem. When I stepped this print out onto a yard of fabric, this is how it looked: |
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I know this is fussy, but I didn’t love the way the trees created columns down the fabric, and I began to wish they were staggered instead of stacked in a row. So I went back to the drawing board one more time and created a repeat that was twice the height of the original. |
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You can see that the artboard is much taller now, and contains two sets of each of the elements. This allowed me to offset one group from the other so they weren’t stacked on top of each other. (I had to do some extra work to blend everything together in this new formation, but it was totally worth it.) Now my one yard of fabric looked like this: |
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Much better! This would cut up much more nicely than the tree-column version. Once my layout was finished, it was time to recolor it and come up with the three colorways that would live in the final group. (Fun fact: I often use a more “vintage” color palette in my beginning artworks. The drab colors usually get kicked out when I’m doing the final color for the collection.) |
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Andddd one hundred color options later… Voila! I think I spent 6-8 weeks working on this print until I felt happy with it. Every time I felt stuck, I put it aside for a few days and came back again later. I’m amazed at how much problem-solving the back of my brain will do when I walk away from something, and how new solutions will dutifully be waiting for me when I come back. When I finished this print I felt excited and energized; I’d done something I hadn’t seen myself do before! While this doesn’t happen all the time in my art, it’s definitely the feeling that makes it most rewarding. Here’s to coming back again and again to art that brings us joy! |
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We want to share with you some of the things that we've been loving lately with the! Click the links below to check them out! Melody's loving this Non-Toxic Vegan Sunscreen. |
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