Designing My First Collection
I’ve recently entered the Wraptious artist competition with my very first collection.
I’m a freelance graphic and web designer with a passion for illustration and pattern design. Throughout June and July 2023, I designed my first mini collection. Over the last few years, I’ve spent most of my spare time experimenting with different illustration styles, learning how to create repeat patterns, and making physical product samples. I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t had much direction or focus, and I have felt like I’m flailing about. However, I was lucky enough to get a place on Hatch Enterprise’s Launchpad course, and it has been a massive game changer. I now understand the problem I’m trying to solve with my business and the joy I want to spread through my illustrations. It has enabled me to pull together my first collection of loosely pun-based, hopefully cute illustrations! I thought it would be interesting to document the process I went through to design these cushions…
“Veggie friends”
I created a pattern called “Veggie Friends” back in the summer of 2021 for a Spoonflower competition. The design challenge revolved around the theme of vegetables. As a fan of kawaii-style illustrations, I particularly love how striking characters appear when they are in black and white for colouring book illustrations. With that in mind, I wanted to recreate that style, with a touch of color. I’ve always been fond of these vegetable characters as I find them slightly different from kawaii illustrations created by other artists.
Shortly after creating my vegetable characters, I brainstormed a list of additional characters with the intention of designing a total of twelve for a calendar.
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Sushi
- Breakfast food
- Fast food
- Stationery
- Weather
- Space
- Biscuits / cakes
- Ice Cream
- Christmas
- Plants / flowers
- Seaside
- Ice Creams
- London / England
Biscuits
In the spring of 2022, I revisited this style of illustration and began designing characters based on biscuits and cakes. As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, I tend to invest a significant amount of time in “perfecting” each character. Consequently, my artboards can become quite cluttered, and I make a conscious effort not to delete any failed attempts, in case I ever want to revisit anything. It’s also not uncommon for me to discover notes to myself detailing specific revisions I want to make!
I encountered some difficulties while working on a few characters, especially the Viennese whirl and ‘jam and cream’ biscuits. Representing biscuits such as Bourbon and Lotus, which feature text, presented a challenge for me. I wanted to avoid incorporating words in the illustrations to keep the characters as simple as possible. This style of illustration also poses a unique challenge, requiring me to create the biscuits using as few lines as possible to fit within the limited space available. It’s fascinating to see how just a few swirls can still capture the essence of a custard cream.
As I struggled with the final few biscuit characters, I did lose some interest in them. However, I tried to showcase them on my Instagram grid and came up with a “Dunk, dunk, dunk” design. It was inspired by my 2-year-old niece, who has a habit of saying things in threes. She would insist on saying “dip, dip, dip” before eating any chips, as she always dips them in baked beans or ketchup first!
Ice Creams
A few months later, I returned to this illustration style and began creating ice cream characters. Being an enthusiastic viewer of Wimbledon, ice creams seemed like the perfect subject to explore during the summer season.
Wraptious 2023
2022 was an eventful one for me. While my health was improving, I didn’t dedicate much time to design during that year. Instead, I prioritised spending quality time with my family and friends, making memories. Unfortunately, in March 2023, my health took a downturn once again, leaving me with a lot of free time on my hands and I turned to my creativity to pass the time.
On one particular evening, I focused on designing stationery illustrations to expand my collection of kawaii characters.
Wraptious holds two competitions each year, one in the summer and one in the winter. As the winner of these competitions gets the opportunity to become one of their artists, I always try to enter. My plan this summer was to create four new patterns to accompany my “Veggie Friends” design. However, there was still a considerable amount of work ahead. Once all the characters were designed, I still needed to create repeat patterns from them. This was my starting point for this collection:
- Biscuits: 80% of the characters were finished.
- Ice Creams: 50% of the characters were finished.
- Stationery: Only 20% of the characters were finished.
- Weather: All characters were completed.
In a previous year, I entered my garden and weather characters, which turned out to be my most successful entry. Wraptious selects their winner from a shortlist of twelve artists, six of whom have received the most votes from the public, and six that Wraptious has chosen, regardless of their social media following. Additionally, Wraptious provides a “special mention” list for artists deserving recognition, and my weather characters received a mention.
Designing
Feeling optimistic, I decided to begin creating the repeat pattern for the weather collection, assuming that it wouldn’t take too long to transform the characters into line illustrations and create a repeat pattern. However, after dedicating a day to the design, it was a bit of a reality check, and I realised just how much work was still ahead of me.
As I moved on to working on the ice cream characters, progress slowed down even further. Being a perfectionist, I dislike rushing my work as it often leads to the need for revisions and improvements later on. Additionally, my schedule became increasingly hectic throughout June. Balancing my freelance work, Hatch Zoom sessions, and homework left me with only small pockets of time, like half an hour or an hour here and there to dedicate to my illustrations. Consequently, I made very little progress.
By the end of June, I only had the mint ice cream character left to perfect but it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to complete another three repeat patterns in time for the deadline.
Breakthrough
I plan to write about my experiences with Hatch in a separate blog article, but within a few weeks of starting the course in April, I realised that my illustrations had an uplifting spirit. It became important to me to have a positive message at the core of my art.
Acknowledging that I wouldn’t be able to complete a further three new patterns for the Wraptious deadline, my mind kept returning to my “Dunk, dunk, dunk” illustration. I had always wanted to create a fast-food-inspired version inspired by my niece. If I could create a vegetable illustration, I would be well on my way to creating a mini collection. I settled on the idea of a collection centered around “dunk and dip,” with the addition of three puns.
I experimented with various puns and positive messages, some of which included:
- Rooting for you — Vegetables
- Let’s weather the storm together
- Don’t let your ice cream melt, while you are counting someone else’s sprinkles!
- You are fab — Ice creams
- Rule the world — Stationery
- We all make mistakes — Stationery
- Dip, dunk and savour the crunch — Biscuits
- Tough cookie — Biscuits
- Smart cookie — Biscuits
I dedicated a few days to working on the collection, iterating the designs until I finally arrived at these illustrations. One significant change I made was increasing the vibrancy of the “Dip, dip, dip” design because I wanted the cushions to exude brightness and fun!
I’m filled with excitement about these designs and incredibly grateful for the positive reception they have received. There is still time to vote for them until July 10th, and you even have the option to purchase them! I’m thrilled to announce that I have already made one sale, which I am incredibly grateful for.
You can vote via the website or via Facebook. You can also buy the cushions until the end of July and at the moment, there’s a discount code ‘COMP23’ with 20% off at checkout.
Work with me!
You can explore my portfolio on Dribbble at http://katherinecory.com to see more of my freelance work. If you’d like to delve into my illustrations, patterns, and my journey toward launching my illustrated product business, please visit my Instagram page at http://instagram.com/katherinecory!
