Garden for Maria Sibylla Merian

This li’l patch o’ heaven is a repeating design.  I started with a hideous Photoshop template cobbled together from rough sketches.  This I used to generate was I was calling “clumps”—clumps of flowers, basically, but in the arrangement that would eventually tile endlessly according to the template.

There were three flowers clumps and a separate bird drawing and also a separate drawing of rocky soil.

Then I colored them in Photoshop.  My favorite way is to scan them in full color—and my scanner thinks pencils draw in green for some reason, so there’s plenty of weird color information even though the drawings appear more or less black and white to the eyeball.

I use the “selective color” option a lot of the time.  Mostly altering the neutrals and whites.  Just playing around until I sigh with deep and profound happiness.  I love color.  My eyeballs CRAVE color.  Bright, bright, warm color! Lots and lots of it.  But I prefer color relationships to sad lonely isolated colors.

When the coloring was done, I re-tiled the image according to the template.  It did have the teeniest seam…grrr…..which I painstakingly deleted.

What’s it all about Alfie?

The florid profusion of life…the persistent insistence of life on growing despite our best attempts to plasticize the world into a pseudo synthetic ersatzerama of fakedy fakeness.

Have I mentioned before that I barely interact with nature?  Yep: this is what I imagine plant life to be like.  In this way, I have nothing in common with Maria Sibylla Merian 

If you don’t know who she is, for goodness sake, look her up.Details: I was gonna color those birdies but I figured they would totally disappear if I did. So now they get to be ghost birds. Also, they cast a slight shadow on the ground below which helps distinguish them.  Note: I never use the drop shadow feature in the layer menu as every drop shadow looks terrible and very 2-D.As for size, the image is virtual and repeatable. the tile could be as large as, oh, two feet and could be endlessly repeated to infinity. Or smaller...its digital and the files size is ample

 So will this become wallpaper or fabric?  That’s a question I have been getting a LOT.  OK: I have some sort of crazy mental block about actually producing this.  Its not that I don’t want to—its that once the piece is done (and done means the design itself) then I havemoved on to other projects and the very last thing on earth I want to get involved in is figuring out marketing.

YES: I know Spoonflower will set up a shop for you.  My gallery wants to produce wallpaper, but not fabric so perhaps both will happen.

 Details below!: