Have you ever heard about Spoonflower’s Design Challenges? That’s what today’s blog post is about - a Spoonflower Design Challenge inspired me to create my Party Rabbits design above. Firstly, if you have never heard of Spoonflower, it is a FANTASTIC website where you can upload your designs, and transform them into fabrics, wallpaper or household items such as pillow cases or tablecloths. Three Bears Prints has a shop on Spoonflower, and I love creating designs to sell or order fabric for myself to transform into presents for my family and friends.
So what is a Design Challenge? Spoonflower runs design challenges once every two weeks. They provide you with parameters to work within to create a design. Sometimes this might be a palette of certain colours; it may be prompts on a specific theme; and you are always directed on its final format, whether that is a fat quarter of fabric, a roll of wallpaper or a cushion. They are really fun to take part in and participation holds many benefits. For me, it gives me motivation and a sense of purpose. It very much stimulates my creativity - especially when a theme resonates with me, a design often pops straight in my head. The theme prompts often send you in a direction you may never have considered before. Being part of a competition gives you that feedback loop on the kinds of designs people like - and you can also express your own opinion by voting for your favourites! I really enjoy it.
I thought I would share the development and application of my entry to Party Wall. The prompt was: “Give your walls something to dance about! Create a feel-good design that makes you want to get up and celebrate when you walk into a wallpapered room. Consider bold, bright colors and cheerful motifs that could be used in a playroom, entertaining space or used as a backdrop for good times and gathering. Put your party hats on and get your artist tools ready to submit a lighthearted design featured on a wallpaper roll in this week’s Party Wall Design Challenge”. You can see above the winner of this challenge.
I absolutely love the illustrations of Margaret Tarrant (the Fairies series) and E H Shepard (Winnie the Pooh) - sweet drawings drawn in pen and ink with a wash of colour. Although I can in no way emulate their incredible talent and skills, I certainly cannot fail to be inspired by them. For some reason, as soon as I read the prompt, the thought of ‘party rabbits’ popped in my head. I often draw animals in human situations, and I immediately thought of how rabbits may behave if they were at a party. You can see my three initial ideas above.
I whittled this down to two - a rabbit inadvertently taking off while holding on to a balloon - and a rabbit tucking into the birthday cake (presumably before it has even been presented to the host!). Their size and shape fitted together as a pattern, and somehow, I just could not make the rabbit opening presents work as a motif.
I am SO happy with this design, and I have used it to create gift bags for my daughter’s friends who are celebrating their own birthdays. And this is one of the important thing about the Design Challenges - this design received a paltry 9 votes in the challenge (I realise I did a poor job of following the brief which requested bright colours) and has only had 29 favourites so far. But the important point is this does not matter - what matters is myself, and the other 1500 people who participated created something completely unique. That process holds ‘intrinsic value’ - it is an inherently satisfying activity which is so enriching individually, regardless of extrinsic, external outcome. For me, this is the most significant aspect of the Spoonflower Design Challenges - that they encourage you to develop your artistic practice and tap into your creativity, taking you on a completely unexpected journey.
