Two hours of drawing, pleasantly accompanied by the Seamwork podcast. I’m working on this for Spoonflower’s damask challenge tomorrow (due at 2 CST), which means that at some point tomorrow morning, I have to take this triangle and figure out how to seamlessly repeat it in Procreate to create a damask pattern, WITHOUT tiny white lines showing up at the borders. There may be much silent swearing, we’ll see.
But for now, I’m pretty pleased with where I’ve gotten, and am going to knock off for the night. I’ll probably tweak the spacing a bit more in the morning before doing anything else — I think I might delete one of the bottom banana bunches. And maybe try adding some decoration to the elephant’s back. Hm.
Goals for this one were to use a traditional Sri Lankan demon mask as the base — the peahen one, in this case, Mayura Raksha. Hanging one of these masks in your home is said to bring peace, harmony and prosperity, so I thought it would make a splendid wallpaper pattern.
The original colors on the masks are generally very bright, and don’t always fit so well into modern decor. So I’m planning to do this in one or two tones (might add a background color), keep the overall effect reasonably neutral. But yes, it’s very pink right now — that’s ’cause I’m simultaneously designing for a different challenge, which had a limited color palette, and this specific pink is one of the colors.
Fun for spring coming, though I’ll be trying other colors too, I imagine. (I have to figure out how to make Procreate change all instances of one color to another — I really hope there’s a simple technical way to do that. REALLY.)
I included the elephant because elephants. When you go to the elephant orphanage, you can feed the elephants bananas and other fruits, which they just slurp up whole with their trunks. Very fun. And the monkey because monkeys, and because Kavi and I had a really nice time walking through a nature preserve and encountering a large group of monkeys.
Oh, I miss traveling. In a non-pandemic, we might’ve been planning a Sri Lanka trip this summer, running a writing & food retreat. Well, maybe 2022. A girl can dream, and in the meantime, there are pink elephants.
(If this works out well, I also want to try it on fabric. I think it could be pretty cool on a sling chair for summer outdoors…)
