Are you ready for the Summer....

The nice weather is finally upon us here in New England... which means we can venture out of the studio and spend more time sketching outside in the sun ..yahoo!

Sun being the key word here...so without further adieu we are so excited to share with you the start of our new designs Summer: Sand, Sun & Swirly collection.

Once we decided summer was the theme, the wave of ideas just come flowing out.:)

We will put any and every idea on paper and then combine, edit and redraw. The color sketches above are the result of many, many, many rough sketches. And these will still go through another round of  edits once we start working them out in clay. 

COLOR is what helps keeps continuity with any collection. We are really liking the color palette of blues, oranges, yellow/greens and gray for this summer line.

These 3D figures have become a staple in our past collections and they are so much fun to create. We cannot wait to see how these turn out. 

We will keep you posted as the collection progresses. We are planning for a launch date sometime in June.  

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Do you have a doodle book?

Ever since our our days in art school Lianne and I were encouraged to always keep a sketchbook with us at all times and make it a habit of sketching in the book everyday. Well, it's been along time since our days of art school and many of the sketchbooks were tossed away, placed high on the book shelf or just became quick sketches on paper and discarded after the project was complete.

It wasn't until we started designing our ornaments that the sketchbook ritual returned and become such a vital part of the designing process again and our designs. Nowadays we can't think of not having one the sketchbook. These days it is not as easy for Lianne to always keep up with a sketchbook, but she definitely tries. I try to take it everywhere... to family events, appointments, even jury duty. I highly recommend everyone keep a "doodle" book in one form or another. It's such a great way to express your creative ideas and becomes a great reference and inspiring guide.

This weekend I started my 12th sketchbook (it usually take me a year to fill one up). After adding the 11th book to the shelf I thought I would visit some of the pages from the past eleven years.

Kicking off the 12th book, are the start of the sketches from our new Easter/Spring collection. The sketch books I prefer are called Cachet Studio. They're available in wonderful colors and sizes. I've been using them for years and really enjoy them. I love the 5 x 8 size because I prefer to sketch smaller and it makes a great travel companion where as Lianne enjoys the bigger size to sketch in.


I try to make sure I record each and every thought.... the good and the bad.


This page was the start of the design process for our Swirly Designs name. At one point, we were considering the name Swirly Things Designs for a while. Yikes!


I also like to add notes and color to some of the sketches to help fine tune some of the possible designs.


At one point we were tossing around the idea of creating a Swirly Designs calendar and on the right side was a sketch of an early craft show booth layout.


I'll randomly add the date and even sometimes the time on the top of the page. Why... I don't know. Sometime it fun to look back and see when and what time the ideas were created.


Above, shows our now six year old's 1st birthday invite illustration and sketches.


and from sketch to final product, it's always fun to see the design process come alive.

So we encourage you all to go and pick up a sketch book and start DOODLING your creative life!

HOP TO IT!

We are EGG-erly awaiting Spring here at the studio. These last few weeks we have been bouncing around sketching away, and creating some new how-to projects and we've been trying to check out all the new Easter treats that are hitting the stores.

Easter is one of our favorite holidays to celebrate and to design for. We are EGG-cited that it's coming a little later this year, so we will have plenty of time to design a wonderful collection for your Easter/Spring festivities. Last year we missed out on a new collection because Easter came earlier than we expected and didn't plan enough time to create. So to make sure that won't happen to us again we did a little searching to find out when Easter will fall in the next few years and this is what we found:
In 2012 Easter will be on April 8th-Early!
In 2013 Easter will be on March 31st! Very early, ikes! Can you say green bunnies?

We are going have to start planning NOW for those future dates!

But back to 2011. Our new Easter/Spring collection hopefully will be online in early April so make sure you have signed up for our email list so you will be notified when the collection is online.


** Update on our sketches... they are done now on to the clay....





bunnies bunnies and more bunnies.

Just a sneak peek to get you egg-cited!

HOP HOP HOP

Behind the design of our Swirly Leprechaun

As we welcome March, we realize that it also happens to be National Craft Month! What a terrific reason to celebrate! Try a new technique or perhaps you can teach someone how to do your favorite craft.

So with St.Patrick's day quickly approaching we thought we would share with everyone how we created this lucky little Leprechaun ornament from this years collection.

After having many requests about making St. Patrick's ornaments we decided to included a few designs with the 2010 Valentine's Day collection launch and the response was very positive. We are happy to say we have included St. Patrick' s Day ornaments to the Swirly family and are excited to share these holiday designs each year that sparkle in tones gold and greens. Perfect for that gold feather tree in the hall. Cheers!


First thing is the sketching. We came up with some iconic images to represent St. Patty's day and hands down we agreed on a lucky little leprechaun. To create this design we decided to create and sculpt a handmade stamp similar to the one we designed for our popular Old St. Nick's designs we had offered last Christmas.


Once we got the look we liked of the Leprechaun, we'll then draw it on trace paper so we can transfer it onto a white eraser. Using a linoleum block cutter tool (which comes with interchanging size blades) we carve away the eraser to create our leprechaun stamp.




So here is the finished stamp it doesn't look like much now.... but just wait.


Now we'll test the stamp in our sketch book to see how it's going to look, making sure the detail is all there before we use it in the clay. We noticed the shamrock needed some adjustments and we were deciding if we should include a rainbow in his hands or not.


Once the clay base is made we will stamp it into a thinner piece of clay, add some details with our stylus, like features and hair and then continue finishing up the ornament. We paint, varnish & glitter and we end up with a glittery dancing lucky leprechaun!



Here is the Old St. Nick stamp and ornament we did for Christmas. We just love the look of this handmade, old wood cut feel these stamps evoke.


There is still time to purchase one of the last of our Swirly Leprechaun or Shamrock ornaments just in time for St. Patrick's Day. Check out the Shop Our Designs page link.


Have a wicked awesome St. Patrick's Day and Happy Crafting!
~Lianne & Paul

All images, text, and content on this site are the sole property of Swirly Designs and may not be used, copied without the express consent by Lianne or Paul

Love is in the works

With a new year brings new ideas. Christmas has come and gone here at the studio (we do actually have a few designs left over from last years collection here if you are still interested)

We are now in full Valentine's Day mode. These past few weeks we have been sketching out some new ideas for Valentine's Day. We've been creating Valentine's for quite a few years now so it's a bit of a challenge coming up with new approaches for this holiday of love.

This is one of the few holidays where everyone expects to see lots of hearts and colors of reds & pinks ... but we are fine with that! It's what we want as well! From what we can see, we think you will be very happy with this years collection.... if all goes well they will be online Feb 1st.

Here I am sketching away in our favorite sketch book on a chilly sunny morning. We'll fill approx one sketch book up designing a years worth of collections (around 4-5 holidays) so when we start designing a new collection we will flip through some of the past books to see if we have any ideas that we can incorporate into our new collection. From these little sketches we will start picking out possible pieces for our new collection and we will redraw them bigger and fine tune the designs.


Here is a sneak peak of this years collection. The sketches on the white paper were selected from our sketches. We look at all of them together so we can make sure there is a nice mix of designs that range in sizes and colors. We try to incorporate new materials to our ornaments like crepe paper, beads or resin.


When we start creating in clay, we have a variety of tools to work with as well as custom templates. All the white hearts you see on our table we made because even with all the heart shaped cookie cutters out there we still couldn't find the right shape that we wanted so we made our own.


This is where we are in the making of this years designs. We still have a lot to do in next few weeks before our launch on February 1st. Never a dull moment around here in the studio.

How is your week going?

Halloween in July: Still sketching....

It's been over a week since our last post and there are 10 days left in July. Well from the looks of it we can tell you right now that it would take a miracle to complete our whole Halloween collection in 10 days!

Back in the day, (before kids!) we probably could pull it off. But we have faith! It still feels like we are ahead of the game and like we mentioned in our last post the ideas and sketches are the most important factor in any collection and sometimes you just can't rush through it.

We took this photo today of our work table, lots of things going on to create the perfect collection. The small sketch book (bottom right) is our idea/doodle book everything goes into this: thoughts, phrases, inspirations. We have tons of those sketches books swirling around the studio here. Then once we feel we have enough ideas to work from (or we just have to move on) we will go through the pages and redraw and fine tune them. Then we will rework them again on trace paper where we will also play with color. The big black portfolio under the sketch book and papers is where we keep all our finalized sketches so we can quickly reference past collections. Of course even with perfect sketches we still need to leave room for happy mistakes as we like to call them.

Have a great rest of the week.
~Lianne & Paul

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

Sneak Peek....

Hello Spring, where have you been? We have been waiting for you to arrive for quite awhile now.

Today is the first day of Spring and we are working away here at the studio adding the final touches to our Spring collection. We hope to have the collection up by the beginning of next week.

Here is a sneak peak from our sketch book of the new collection. We have a nice mix of birds, bunnies and flowers to brighten up you spring time decor. Speaking of decor we are always looking for fun displays and trees to showcase our ornaments along with other pieces we pick for the season (we will post some pictures of our holiday finds in our next post). We have been admiring this egg shape tree from the Bethany Lowe spring collection for awhile and we finally managed to find it at bayberry cove, a great website filled with wonderful artisan licensed artwork for every occasion. It arrived in the mail last week and it is waiting for us to adorn it with our new spring and Easter designs. We think this tree is just eggcellent.

Make your own inspiration boxes & binders

We love the holidays and we love collecting! Especially love collecting stickers, cards, tags, bags...really anything that catches our eye. Being seasonal designers we are always creating a seasonal collection in a different season. Like designing winter collections in the summer, spring collections in winter etc. We realized we needed systems to organize these items. After a long search we came across these 12 x 12 clear boxes that are used for scrapbook paper.




We categorize them by the holiday and they are stackable. They are clear, so it's easy to see what is inside quickly. Whenever we are in need of inspiration for any holiday we can just pull the box out.



Here is a sample of the halloween/autumn box



Here is one of the holiday boxes.

We also purchase a lot of holiday magazines –we've mentioned this before here. When we get overwhelmed with them or if we feel that they are taking over the studio we cut them up and take the pictures we want and put them in a box.





Then we will go through them and categorize them. We'll lay them out and tape them to a piece of paper and slip them into non glare sheet protectors and then put them into binders. We use these great binders we found by Russell & Hazel. The orange binder is dedicated to colors & pattern, the white binder is for christmas and the green is for all other holidays: valentines, halloween and easter.



This approach makes it so much easier to go through all those articles and pictures you wanted to save. You can use page dividers to separate sections. This will cut down clutter in your work space. This approach has saved us time searching for images and has freed up valuable shelf space. It's always a on going project, but well worth it. So if you have tons of magazine laying around your home why not try and organize them in your very own binder or box.

Here are some pages samples

Sketching our life

Here at Swirly Designs we feel that there is nothing more important than a good sketch book. Years ago, when Lianne and I were in art school, we each had to get a sketch book and we were expected to sketch in it every day for at least 15 minutes. At the time I felt like it was a big waste of time. Fast forward 16 years later and we can't image our creative lives without them. That initial recommendation in art school stuck with us during our careers. We realized early on that our sketches were helpful in our creative endeavors. We would end up referring to a sketch or an idea in our book and use that in a project. Through the years we tried all sorts of styles of sketch books, from really large books to small ones, to ones that were very expensive and we were afraid to mess up the pages with our doodles. We found ones that we could use markers and not have it bleed through.

We finally came across a brand of sketch books called Cachet Studio. They're available in wonderful colors and sizes. We've been using these for a while and really enjoy them. I use the 5 x 8 size because I prefer to sketch smaller, and Lianne enjoys a bigger size to sketch in.

What type of sketch books do you use? Let us know, we'd love to hear!