Christmas in October

One of my biggest challenges as a surface/textile designer is inspiring myself to create art for a season that we aren't currently in the middle of. I am usually working on product design about 18 months ahead of when it will actually hit store shelves. So I am currently wrapping up my designwork for Holiday 2007 and now focusing on Spring 2008. It gets so confusing sometimes, that when I'm writing a check I have to think soooo hard about what today's date is, due to constantly living in the future!

I thought it would be fun to share a new holiday design collection I've worked on called Holiday Hoopla. Below is the original painting where I've definitely taken a less traditional approach to holiday and concentrated on the visual hoopla of it all.



I designed the painting so that it could easily be repeated for items such as giftwrap, or table textiles, etc. Below its shown in repeat pattern & you can see where the different elements pop up and repeat themselves.



Some types of products may have different coordinating pieces, such as paper tableware, that has 2 sizes of plates and napkins. For that situation I will usually pull out just a few elements of the main design and create a seperate design, to break up the monotony. I think of this process as how I would layer pillows together and how I would want to mix size, color and detail. Here's a few examples:






So there's a festive glimpse of another day in the life of this studio! If you have a hard time enjoying these holiday images during the beginning of fall, do what I do and just flip on Johnny Mathis Christmas and jingle all the way. This technique of mine has also proven to completely confuse my sweet children.

Happy Holidays!!
xoxo,AM