Chevrons!  What’s not to love, a simple inverted “V” that makes a wonderful striking and bold pattern.  Great for interiors and clothes designs.

Available at our Online Store.

Love chevrons too, check out our Insights and Inspiration behind our Chevron Texture Pack!

When I am at home designing, often different projects can overlap, or lead to new ideas. That’s what happened earlier, whilst working through some new patterns and collections I noticed a “theme” that would  make fantastic textures.

When I create textures, fabrics or any design that requires a  “pulled together look” ie, colour palettes or coordinating patterns I like to put the textures and patterns through their paces so to speak and to offer more versatility to the collection as they can be mixed and matched with different packs to create unique pieces, which I know is very important to the creators and designers that use our textures!

I have to stop for a moment and give credit to a Plurk buddy of mine, the wonderfully talented TrinityBelle Meriman owner  and designer of Fucifino.  Trin shared a picture of a work in progress a few days ago and I loved the colour palette, bright yellows and fresh greens, balanced with blacks.  It is a fantatstic collection and I so adored the yellow!

When I received the set from Trin I realised how much this yellow chair had sparked the inspiration for the first few colour combinations of our chevron texture pack.

The Chair and complete New Orlandos Collection (consisting of lampshades, art, and those fab chairs) are out NOW at Fucifino.

I had such fun working with these textures that I thought I’d share some of my inspirations and mood boards I created whilst designing the collection.

 A little bit of sunshine.

(coat – Chevron Yellow burst, collar – sunny linen, 1. basket weave – off white, 2.  Coastal wood – sunshine, 3.  Charm fabric – golden )

 Sweet Zigzags.

(coat – chevron sweet, collar – shiny teal, thumbnail 1. chevron zigzag, thumbnail 2.  chevron chrush, bag idea – chevron zigzag)

Classic Elegance.

(coat – chevron grey, collar – black velvet)

Spring Greens.

(coat – chevron spring green, collar – fresh green linen)

Vintage inspired.

(coat – chevron vintage, collar – shiny taupe, Fold overlay texture on chevron vintage texture, bag – Maitreya Mesh Leather Satchel)

Really pleased with this collection, who doesn’t love a bit of chevron styling!  You can pick up the completed set of textures from our online store and if you would like to share any of your designs feel free to drop by our Facebook Page…….we’d love to feature you on our blog :)

I recently signed up for a really exciting course, The Art and Business of Surface Design by Rachael Taylor and Beth Nicholls.

Aptly named “Do what you Love”,  it’s a dream course full of creative ideas to get you thinking and working and practical advice from leading experts …. to say I am a little happy would be an understatement!  So whilst I am learning new ways to “play” and stretch my thinking I thought it would be good to share one of the ways I find and work out ideas.

I have also created a “playground” called Pattern&Co. It’s our little place to gather patterns and colours, to share designs and inspiration and a bit about my learning along the way, so if you love patterns and colours I’d love to see you over there :))

Inspiration for me comes from all sorts of places but noticeably I often flick through our vast library of photos, my camera is always on hand and I shoot everything and anything and often find inspiration, colour combinations and pattern ideas all from one photo.

Below is a photo of a rusted railing that I took whilst out and about last year,  It was probably on my way to the shops as I walk past this house quite often. I never really noticed how beautiful the combination of the rust on the rails and changing leaves were until the ferns started to fade and fall into decay too!  Match made in heaven maybe!

Colours of  rust. 

The dependanle little colour picker comes in handy here.

Once I have a few colours selected and they work well together I group them into one layer and play around with them:

Finding the Patterns within.

One of the many new ideas/principles we have been learning in Module 2 is to really look for patterns, draw them, doodle, photograph them, take inspiration from everything…..and make them your own.

I will “play” some more with the pattern, evolve and expand on the ideas and post updates over at Pattern&co.

 

A large collection of Woodsman weathered painted wood – grungier in texture with natural and stained wood, including the big red barn textures!

The unshaded textures are seamless horizontally and vertically and shaded versions are also provided where appropriate!

A great collection! Perfect for all sorts of 3d carpentry, cabinets, floors, walls, doors and wooden builds where you want to add a touch of time worn charm.

Available from our online store (where the contact sheets are available to view) and at Insight Designs.

Peek at just a few of the textures in this pack (138 in total):

{Old barn, Walk in the woods, Cabin, Rustic book , Woodsman wood texture, Barn living}

I love creating mood boards, they focus my ideas and are a great source for inspiration, colour palettes and designs for an entire project.

Sometimes a client will ask you to create something, they love your work and when you ask what style, colours they would like they say it’s up to you, that’s a great compliment but without knowing a few details you could complete a brief and end up with something different than what your client envisaged! Hopefully not but it’s so easy to make a quick mood or inspiration board to show where you want to go with a design and have a chat with the client about it before you start. It’s usually here that I get a lot of input and feedback of what they love, what do they say…..a picture is worth a thousand words and it saves time in the long run!

Anything from a collage of images to a more formal collection of ideas and colours can make up the basis of an inspiration board. Typically I will spend an hour or two making one and often whilst researching one idea I find other ideas for different projects. (hint: bookmark, fav, pin, reference whatever it is, nothing more frustrating than not being able to find the source of the original idea!)

Do you make mood boards?

I have a billion images floating inside my computer and although I am (a little) better organised now I still have plenty of images strewn throughout different folders and I often use search to find them but it’s soooooooo slow, so when I came across Image Finder from Fundy Software I thought I’d give it a go.

Image Finder lives up to its name. It’s very fast and very easy to use!  No photoshop required.

It tracks down files (by the exact name if you wish) and searches folders and sub-folders, from which you can copy to a different location and it’s FREE!

Check out the other resources over at Fundy, I like the look of The Blog Collage, now if they could just make one to find all the images that I know I have but I labelled them “xfgdt” or something equally as random!

Welcome back to the Free Texture Grab, what started out as a relaxing beginning to January has ended in an exciting, although busy end to the month with a couple of fantastic new projects coming up so I thought the name  “Rough and Ready” was quite appropriate! :)

If you want to find out what we are working on next or just keep up to date with the free texture grab come say hello over at our facebook page *waves*

If you only read one thing read this —- No credit is required (but appreciated) and as always free for commercial and non-commercial use. The full TOS can be found here.

Happy days :D

A large collection of weathered painted wood – PAVILLION STYLE!

8 different woods in 8 beautiful soft pastel colours, gently weathered, mix and match perfectly!

The unshaded textures are seamless horizontally and vertically and shaded versions are also provided where appropriate!

A great collection!  Perfect for all sorts of 3d carpentry, cabinets, floors, walls, doors and wooden builds where you want to add a touch of time worn happiness.

Available from our online store (where the contact sheets are available to view) and at Insight Designs.

I like it when I am browsing and stumble upon something that makes great use of textures and design and when I saw maagihas images I just had to share my favourites.

What a great combination of art, textures and creativity.  The way the red pops on the girls hair works so well will the sepia tones and grungy textures.

There are three different versions of the painted girl above, each with varying degrees of texturing but this one is my favourite, the pose and composition with those deep eyes draws you in.

Amazing work!  You can check out more of maagihas art over at Koinup! And there are credits to the textures used in each image :)

Fingers crossed I can grab a printed artwork of  “… long(ing)…” (the top image).  It would look great framed and on my wall at home!

Inspired from our recent holiday in a converted barn, it was beautifully restored, the paintwork and walls were so clean and modern, a breathe of fresh air and kind of appropriate for our first texture pack in the new year.

So if your looking to “renovate” your home check out the Modern Country Living wall textures, seamless horizontally and vertically in classic fresh colours with coordinating dado and white painted half wood paneling textures – a must have for new and old builds!

Only available from Insight designs and larger sizes are available from our Online Shop.