Thursday, May 2, 2013

Self taught design

I'm off to Japan soon! I know everyone thinks this makes me a major jet-setter because I was in Canada just last week - actually technically this week - but actually I just had some air miles that were gonna expire and wedging a visit home at the end of April worked for a multitude of reasons: Surprising my best friend for her birthday, seeing my family for my birthday, stocking up on vitamin D because Calgary is the sunniest city in Canada, and getting another edit done on my manuscript so it's even closer to publication!

Anyhoo - Japan has been a trip in the planning for several months and one which I'm looking forward to not because it's a holiday but because it's going to be a whole new culture for me to explore. I'm a huge fan of Japanese art and design. Visiting a country is a fantastic way to get exposure to different ideas and styles and I'm looking forward to how it will influence my work.

For that reason I'm looking at this trip as a working holiday. I've got a lot of personal design projects to work on and I figure, with all the long train journeys, this is going to be the perfect chance for me to get stuck in on them. I'll get to work on my skills with 'Ideas' - the fabulous new app from Adobe that allows a designer to do vector sketches on a tablet.

I've been playing around with it a little bit already. It's super fun but quite a learning curve when I'm used to drawing directly on a paper or canvas surface. It's just adapting to the artificial environment it creates. I will never abandon sketching things by hand but it's nice to know I can create artwork directly on my iPad and then move that into Illustrator to refine.
















P.S. I did a few designs for the TrollBeads people's choice contest and have just found out I'm a finalist! My design - Two Peas in a Pod - is up for voting and voting ends May 5th. So please help me out by popping over and voting for my bead!
Thank you!

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