Well from the title you're probably wondering did I win or lose. I lost, but it's ok! I'm a little bummed today but tomorrow I'll shove it out of my head and move on to the next thing. I recently submitted a design to the big Lilla Rogers' Global Talent Search. By big I mean there were 1500 people who submitted artwork. Why was this so big? Well the winner gets a 2 year contract for international representation by Lilla Rogers Studio plus some great licensing deals. That's a really big prize in the design world. Today was the big day that everyone who entered found out if they made it to the next round of 50. Yes, it went right from 1500 to 50! When I told my husband last night that I found out there were 1500 submissions he decided to calculate the chances of me getting in, which was 3.33%. This cracked me up because I'm like are you trying to make me feel better?? ha ha I didn't make the cut, but I wasn't expecting to anyways. From time to time I like to enter design contests just to learn and do something new and get out of my normal design mode. I don't really enter them thinking I'm going to win. If I do, awesome but if I don't no big deal, I just like to challenge myself. I did actually win the Pantone Inspired Egg Contest held by Amy Atlas Events a couple years ago. Go check it out, it's kind of funny! I'll have to blog about that sometime. So I wasn't going to show my design unless I made it into the round of 50. Then I changed my mind this morning because I personally really like it and I wasn't going to let not making it to the next round rob me of the joy I had making it. Everyone who entered was given the same design brief/assignment. In general you were to design a journal cover that was 5 x 7 with the theme of old-fashioned playground items and include the word "journal" somewhere in your design. You could interpret this theme anyway you wanted to. Below is my interpretation!
I'll share a little on how my design was developed. The assignment was e-mailed to us while I was in Colorado on vacation the beginning of July. For a brief moment in the woods I had an internet connection and was able to view the assignment. The very rough sketch/concept below is the idea I came up with right after I read the assignment and sat on the deck drawing and watching the river flow by (wish I was still there!). I'm not sure if I went with bears because I was in the middle of the woods or because the visual of chubby bears on playground equipment cracked me up!
Next was to figure out a color palette. I came across this nail polish ad in one of the Ulta flyers and was really drawn to it and thought it seemed fun for my design. I ended up changing the final colors in my design a little from this but this was my initial inspiration. Some of you might have seen me post some of these photos on my facebook page.
I then picked colors from my Pantone swatch book based on the nail polish ad to use in Adobe Illustrator. I pretty much use Illustrator 85% of the time for all my designs and I usually design them directly in Illustrator. That's why my initial concept drawings are very sketchy/scary looking because I do the real drawing on the computer.
For the background I wanted a little texture and decided to take a photo of some sand since you usually find sand or dirt at a playground. The background didn't turn out as texturey (were making that a word today!) as I wanted it to but that's ok. So that's pretty much the process that I went through for this design.
I like it and it really represents my design style of cute and fun! I'll use this on another design project someday. I think it would be a really cute allover print. Hop on over to see the 50 designs that were chosen to move onto the next round. I found it really interesting to see everyone's interpretation when given the same assignment. Also check out this fun time lapsed video that Catriona from CR Patterns made of her design process.
