Antidote for wintery symptoms.

Icy drizzle, low clouds and grey skies - all the symptoms of an oncoming winter! Here's an antidote I've been working on this week for this contest:

Lagoon details: threadfin butterflyfish, flame angelfish and sergeant major fish.

Lagoon details: anthias, clownfish and flame angelfish.

See other t-shirt designs and vote here or read about how I made the water texture here!

Lagoon on a Riviera Tee

Lagoon on a Riviera Tee - the pattern is from One-Yard Wonders.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Palace Garden Repeat

Hi all, hope you had a good weekend! We had a relaxed one with a bit of shopping, a bit of wine and plenty of reading and sleeping!

I've been meaning to make a repeat pattern partner to this design for quite a while now and last week I had the perfect opportunity to concentrate my efforts with the hand drawn design contest. There were over 500 entries this week, the competition over at spoonflower is growing fast!

Palace Garden Repeat

Details of Palace Garden Repeat - click to view larger!

I'm planning on reworking the original too, as soon as I have enough time; so if any of you have had your eye on the colours currently available, now's the time to grab some!

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Update 2014: You can read about the new colours for this pattern here; they're available to order here!

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Lagoon

Lagoon



Lagoon details - click to view larger.

I love the versatility of vector graphics. For anyone who's looking to upgrade their software, I'm currently using Xara Pro 7 (update Nov 12: I've upgraded this to Xara Pro X which you can read about here!) which is a fraction of the price of the Adobe stuff and has a really usable interface. Apart from the layering and flexible editing of shapes that vectors offer, using the texture fills is addictive and they can be absolutely anything. The water in my design above for example, is made up of layers using a photo I took of sunlight reflecting off a bowl and I'm really pleased with how that's turned out!

You can see all the other 'fluid' illustrations here! 15% of proceeds from Lagoon go to the Coral Triangle Initiative!

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Forest & Sea @ Spoonflower

Now available at Forest & Sea on Spoonflower:

Palace Garden in Peacock Blue, Lime and Jaipur Pink

Palace Garden in Indigo and Pomegranate

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

For Sale...

... never-ending yards of Palace Garden in Peacock Blue! Available at Forest&Sea on Spoonflower.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

Folk Tales of India

A new Spoonflower contest entry based on the palace gardens and jungles of India:


Palace Garden in Peacock Blue

Clockwise: Palace Garden in Indigo, Lime, Jaipur Pink and Pomegranate.

Palace Garden Details (click for larger view).

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NEW: See the new colours for this pattern here and the repeat version here!

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

Illustration Friday: Beginning

I've really enjoyed the weekly Illustration Friday challenge since I started participating in January; it has brought out ideas that I would otherwise never have had and it's been so interesting to see everyone else's interpretations of the themes. I've been looking to see if there are other projects out there I would love to join in with and came across Spoonflower, a website where you can order prints of your own textile designs that also holds a weekly design contest. I specialised in textiles at college and have been thinking for a while now that I'd like to get into it again so, to begin, I've entered the design below into this week's contest. If you like it please click through and vote for me!

Vanilla Bean

Vanilla Bean Details

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hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

Illustration Friday: Duet

Monkeys fly on parrots' backs - it's true! OK, I wouldn't believe me either, so have a read about this lazy squirrel monkey and his parrot compadre. I think they make a most excellent duet for Illustration Friday this week!


Lazy Monkey

Click on details for larger image.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

Illustration Friday: Reverse...

...deforestation.

Click to view larger.

My painting is based on the rainforests of Madagascar, fourth largest island in the world and sometimes referred to as the ‘eighth continent’ for its unique and diverse wildlife. Only an estimated 10% of Madagascar’s original forests remain.

The following links are some brilliant ongoing projects for reforestation around the globe. Have a look!

• Eden Reforestation have planted 10 million trees.
• The WWF are working on reforestation and the restoration of degraded forests.

There are loads more out there and I'll update this list as I find them. Anyone got any favourites?

Added on the 15th February:

• The Plant a Billion Trees campaign is an initiative by The Nature Conservancy to restore Brazil's Atlantic Forest. Long isolated from its more famous cousin the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest is unusual in that it comprises a wide range of forest types and habitats. For this reason it is remarkably biodiverse and supports many highly endangered species.
  The aim of the campaign is to reforest 2.5 million acres and connect more than 12 million acres of existing, fragmented habitat with new forest corridors. One Dollar plants one tree!

Added on the 18th March:

• David Attenborough's recent series on Madagascar featured Feedback Madagascar an organisation working on a number of projects which include the Wild Silk Forest Appeal. They aim to plant 30 000 trees to support the local wild silk industry and so encourage protection of the endemic tapia forest. And for those concerned about animal rights, unlike the cultivated silk industry, the cocoons for wild silk are collected after the moth has emerged.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware