Journal: Patterns Emerge

Check out what I designed this week!

Hey everyone! I’m excited to show you the things I made this week, so let’s just jump in, shall we?

I have been alternating between feeling a little silly and feeling a little angry all week. I think maybe this is my new normal in our current political climate. My mood is pretty well reflected in my t-shirt designs this week. I posted them on my teepublic if you want to take one home. I ordered some of the designs I posted last week and have a review below.

I think the Cautiously Optimistic print came out fantastic. I got it on a navy classic male-fit shirt in size medium. The colors are vibrant and the shirt itself is really soft.

I got The Great Indoors on the streetwear fit in salmon. The shirt itself feels good quality. The material feels heavier and it has a bit of texture that reminds me of old shirts I have from the 90s. I’m curious to see how it wears over time.

If you want to order one of my designs through teepublic, I would recommend going with the classic shirt. It is soft and I really like the fit. I think my designs look best on it, too, because the simple blocks of color come out cleaner on the fine knit.

I’ve been really into blue raspberries as a motif. I decided to play with the idea of blue raspberries growing in the wild. I’m really liking the balance between naturalistic and artificial that I achieved with this pattern. The rendering quality looks kind of like something that would end up on a late 80s/ early 90s barbie fabric. Sometimes I think I have grown and changed a lot as a person and other times I realize that my aesthetic sensibilities are about what they were in elementary school.

This early 90s aesthetic sensibility seems to be a running theme in my work lately. I’m very inspired by toys and stationery from that time, though I’m working from memory rather than seeking out actual products. I also find my fascination with Japanese artist Hiroshi Nagai coming out a bit in my landscape images, though I didn’t do this consciously. Unlike Nagai, I’m interested in depicting the visual clutter of infrastructure like power lines into my romanticized cityscapes. I think this also comes from childhood fascination. I’ve written before about the magnetic affect I feel from designs that frustrate me. I used to feel a similar obsessive frustration from how powerlines and freeways and billboards clutter otherwise picturesque environments. I remember trying to take pictures of sunsets on my parents’ camera and feeling so annoyed that there always seemed to be a pole or a fence or a wire in the way. But I also loved to watch the rhythm of traffic lines along the highway during long car rides, particularly when I was lying down in the backseat and looking at the sky. Now, I find myself observing the way that power lines cut through a composition with curiosity.

I think I like this loose production goal I’ve set for myself each week: Design something for a t-shirt/sticker, draw a portrait or landscape, and create a repeating pattern. I’ll report back with more of each next week.