Hey First name / friends!

 

Want to know a time-saving trick for repurposing your artwork?

 

Draw your elements fully, even if they're being blocked by another part of your illustration. This trick has saved me so much time when creating collections. Here's a quick example of it in practice. 👇🏼

 

 

When you have an illustration full of individual elements, they can easily be repurposed into supporting patterns for that main illustration. This is exactly what I did with my recent “Kittens & Shrooms” illustration down below.

 

I loved how the daisies turned out, and I thought they would make a great pattern on their own. Luckily, I drew them fully on their own layers (even though they were tucked behind the kitties!) and was able to easily separate them from the main illustration to create a brand new pattern.

 

Want more tips on creating cohesive collections? Check out this blog post where I share more tips like this!

Spring is on its way (I hope!), so I thought it would be fun to focus on some delicate springtime flowers. I chose daisies because they hit on two major trends – the evergreen floral trend, and the current trend of retro iconography. 

 

I can't wait to see what you make!

 

Don't forget to share your illustrations on Instagram with the hashtag #CreateWithCatCoq and tag me @catcoq for a chance to be featured! 

 

Plus, daisies and other florals are some of the designs featured in my brand new line of decorative phone cases through CellHelmet! 🌼 (This new collab just launched!)

 

Did you hear the news? I'm one of the guest teachers at Bonnie Christine's Immersion course this year where I'll be diving deeper into trend forecasting and how to apply it to the artwork in your portfolio.

Bonnie is a wonderful teacher and her Adobe Illustrator course, Immersion, is opening for enrollment today!

 

This course is a deep-dive into creating professional patterns in Adobe Illustrator. I love using Illustrator for creating crisp, clean vector artwork, but I don't have a lot of classes on the topic. 

 

Bonnie is the Illustrator queen, so if you want to learn more about creating vector artwork for surface design, check out Immersion to learn more! 

 

And hey, if you join the course, I'll see you there for my guest lesson on trend forecasting!

 

A few weeks ago, our #CreateWithCatCoq challenge was a Thailand-inspired tiger theme! Here are a few of the incredible submissions from that challenge!

Have a fabulous week!