Halloween in July: Sketching a collection

We're sketching away, trying not to sweat too much during this New England heat wave that is upon us!

This step is by far is the most important in every great collection we create. We put all our energy (well, what's left when we're not running after two little ones all day) into coming up with new and spooky imagery.

Before we begin each collection we look back to last years collection to see which ones were popular so we can decide if we should re-issue any of them. We also look to see which designs could use a little tweaking and try to determine how many designs we want to focus on for this years collection.

Last year we had approximately 20 designs, which included our new mini designs as well as a few fall designs—which went over very well. If you saw our last post on promotion you know that we didn't get any of the free PR for our Halloween designs that we hope for but we did for Christmas so we need to start and create many more designs for this Christmas season meaning we are only going to create a few Halloween designs for this years collection.

We are going to issue 13 Halloween designs this year. Those would be broken down into 6 Halloween theme, 3 Fall images, 4 mini designs...of course we never know the exact amount until we really start fine tuning the designs but at least it gives us a starting point to make sure we have a nice well rounded collection that has something for everyone.

So how do we began? Over the years we have filled lots of sketchbooks. And with every start of a collection we have pages filled with doodles, ideas, patterns and color schemes. We'll go through and see if any designs have potential for the new collection. We also start by making a list of key words that represent the Holiday. In addition, the studio gets all decked out with our Holiday memorabilia to help us gets focused on Halloween or whatever holiday we are designing for, since we are usually designing off season.

Creating our Halloween collection is always fun because we can get a little twisted and have fun with our ideas but we still find the need to have most of the standard images and colors that represents All Hallows Eve like pumpkins, witches, & ghosts, so actually the real challenge is trying to create original designs while keeping the look and style of Swirly Designs.

Ok, back to the drawing table. We have to go create a spooktacular 2010 collection!
~Lianne & Paul