Amber Lynn Benton 3/27/16 Amber Lynn Benton 3/27/16

Make Art That Sells Bootcamp

So this year I have been taking classes. I have a lot of things to write and share but I thought I would start by just sharing where I am right now.

I'm currently enrolled in Lilla Rogers Make Art That Sells Bootcamp course. Bootcamp is a five month long class. Each month we receive a mini assignment to explore and play with. Then on week two we receive our assignment in the form of a brief.

Our first mini assignment was 1920's hairstyles. I began exploring the 1920s pretty deeply that first week. I watched a couple of TV shows, created a Pinterest board, and after a lot of sketching I even did some watercolor pieces. I discovered that I have spent a long time avoiding drawing faces and this assignment forced me to face that fear.

The brief that we were given to work from was to design an adult coloring book cover. We were given leeway to make the project fun for us, so I turned my project into a color your own desktop calendar. Here is the layout I came up with:

Amber Lynn Benton 3/6/16 Amber Lynn Benton 3/6/16

Personal Goal: 100 Patterns

If you've been reading along you know that almost two years ago I decided to dust off my art skills and try to return to some freelance graphic work. I spent the majority of that year relearning and mastering Adobe Illustrator and becoming familiar with Photoshop and LightRoom. I was also determined to learn how to use my camera and do some simple video editing. At the end of that year I had not only dusted off my skills but had grown in my design capabilities. I began doing some custom graphics work - mainly logo and identity work. It was good to be working again, but I wanted to do something a bit more creative.

I had always wanted to learn to design fabric. As a little girl I would lay under my great grandmother's flour sack quilts and study all of their patterns. Before all the boys were born I used to follow designers like Kaffe Fassett and Susan Singer Sargent mainly because I couldn't get enough of their colors. I began drawing designs by hand with markers and exploring different ideas for collections, but I didn't know how to create the repeats. I did get access to a technical book via interlibrary loan but it was hard to learn just from a book - especially when I could only keep it for such a short period of time.

Then along came all of my boys, a couple of moves, and then the decision to homeschool and all of my art just got shoved in a box. Last year I dusted off that box and began pulling out all of my work. I discovered Creativebug and SkillShare and sites like Make It In Design and Make Art That Sells. In short, I found an entire community of artists with dreams just like mine. I saw many artists who are not only creating designs for fabric, but for a whole host of other products and markets.

I began taking every class I could and I learned multiple ways to create repeat patterns. But the patterns I made were a bit stiff and and I had no idea where to go with my style. One line from Bonnie Christine's Intro To Surface Pattern Design echoed in my mind - "That year I made hundreds of patterns." That seemed like a good solution - just make pattern after pattern and see where that would lead me. So sometime in December I decided that I would make 100 patterns. I began the project in a rather amorphous way and I didn't really have a way to keep track of and count my patterns.

So now I am attempting to keep track of each of my patterns on my website and be consistent to number them when I post them on FaceBook and Instagram. To meet this goal I am only counting technical repeats not 'surface designs' that don't repeat. It's going to take me a little time to format and catalog the images for all of the patterns I have done thus far but keep checking in and I'll post an update when it is current.