As I’ve just joined Spoonflower as a designer, I’m now able to enter their design challenges. There is a different theme each week and a recent theme that stood out to me was ‘Hometown Tea Towel’.
I’ve wanted to create a Sunshine Coast-themed tea towel design for awhile now so this challenge was a great incentive!
I had collected quite a few interesting shells the last couple of times I visited the beach, and decided these would be the feature of my design.
I basically spent every nap time drawing and painting to get the shells finished in time – the first shell I drew was quite detailed and I spent ages on it, towards the end as I was running out of time the pictures got less detailed ha ha!
I am not sure if my technique is correct… I draw the outline, the colours, and main details of the shell with watercolour pencils, then paint over with water, then repeat until I am happy with the picture. Some of the pictures I also drew over the watercolour with coloured pencil for extra detail and also used white watercolour paint for highlights (from my daughter’s $3 watercolour set!).
I really like souvenir vintage tea towels and when I started putting all my shells together in Photoshop I realised this would be a perfect look for my tea towel.
I found a fabulous retro font and also hand-painted the word ‘shells’. I also created a speckled background of pink, purple and yellow paint marks.
I’m quite happy with how this turned out! I may even get it printed to use in real life 🙂
If you like my design, it would be AWESOME if you could vote for it in the design challenge!
There are lots of other great entries and you may even see one for your hometown – the link is Spoonflower Hometown Tea Towel Design Challenge.
Thanks and I hope you all have a great weekend 🙂