I love entering the fortnightly Spoonflower Design challenges, and when the theme of Timeless Nursery Wallpaper came up, I immediately had the idea of something coastal and calming.
The brief was to design something that could grow with the child, and last longer than the first few years, as let's face it, wallpapering in general is a bit of effort, and redecorating your child's room in those busy, early years, isn't always foremost on your mind.
I thought of cute, swooping gulls in dreamy pastels, with abstract clouds and texure, and happy little rainbows (I've adopted the rainbow as a personal symbol in recent years, so they always pop into my head to try and include in a design if I can). It's worth seeing this repeat in action in the image below, and how the way I've laid out the gulls creates a lovely undulating, chevron effect.
It feels pleasing to the eye - do you agree?
I loved drawing these gulls on my iPad, using a delicately textured, painterly brush.
I wasn't sure about the background colour and swithered between this dusty blue or a bright lemon. I was thinking of making it as gender neutral as possible, but ultimately, I decided I would still use blue in a baby girls' nursery, for both decor and for clothes, so I went with my gut instinct.
Metallic wallpaper launched on Spoonflower earlier this year, and I think the silver metallic brings the blues out beautifully in this design. It would certainly add an extra-special subtle sheen to any room.
There's a plethora of amazing designs as always, and I love to see how other designers interpret the theme. I especially love all the cute woodland creatures, and ended up voting for 52 designs, including my own.
I love to support other designers, and be part of a surface pattern community. I never place that well in the challenges, and I do start to doubt myself a bit, but at the same time, I don't do tons of promo for myself, so maybe that needs to change?
I think it's also important to show a part of the process in these days of Artificial Intelligence. I'm not against A.I in principle, as I think it can be useful in terms of ideas generation or to quickly visualise and convey an idea. I've started using it to create mock-ups to promote my products, but I also want people to know and appreciate that all my motifs and designs are hand-drawn by me, and I create the patterns using layers in either Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Photoshop.
Let me know what you think of this design - would you go 'coastal' for a timeless nursery theme, or perhaps you can envision this design being used elsewhere?
I've created it at a large scale as it's intended use is wallpaper, however I think it would be nice in matching cushions and throws, or you could mix and match the colourways to create an overall calming and matching space, like for a beach house or holiday home maybe?
I made the lemon version for sale, and will probably do some others too, including smaller scales. It looks really sweet and adds an almost vintage vibe with the texture of the Grasscloth wallpaper, and I also love it in the silver metallic!
Let me me know if there's any specific colours you'd like to see and I'll see what I can do!
You can vote in the challenge...there's 21 pages of designs however :)
Voting closes on Tuesday 19th November 2024, 8pm GMT. Thank you <3