I’ve made an important decision…to step away from the textile design program I was attending. I’ve been thinking about this for quite awhile and this month I’ve made it final.
I feel like it was the right time. I’ve taken all of the painting workshops and the computer courses - so I know the techniques and […]

Ok, so I know what you’re thinking…UrbanBurp? What is that?!
Well let me tell you about this hidden treasure. It’s a little shop up in San Francisco specializing in rare vintage fabrics, home decor and upholstery. The owner, Electra Skilandat (pictured below) is just wonderful and my oh my does she have an eye for fabric.

Most […]

YAHOO! (and I don’t mean the search engine.)
In school we were given this assignment, lets just say MANY moons ago. Once a student gets through this the rest seems like, well, a walk in the park (although not quite THAT easy).
I’ve been working on my Jacobean layout for quite awhile and it was finally approved! […]

For a wee bit I felt like I was teetering on the edge - good grief there is always so much to do! My blog took a backseat for awhile but I feel like I’m catching my breath now. Whew.
School is still in session, we get a two week break for summer - I was […]

Our latest computer class for school was “knits and weaves”. What we basically learned to do was take knitted stitches - they can be any kind and create a repeating all over pattern and then add color. I took this one, created the swatch and then colored it in using green and purple.
Now mind you, […]

Well I haven’t written about school in quite a bit, not because I haven’t been doing anything mind you. :)
So…one of the requirements in the program is to take a design I’ve created and “map it” onto a product to give manufacturers an idea of what something could look like.
I created the swatch on […]

The latest workshop for school was another watercolor one (yeah)!
This time we learned about painting leaves. Using reference material our instructor gave us we spent the whole day on these rose leaves.
We used four Windsor & Newton colors:
Windsor Yellow
Permanent Sap Green
Windsor blue
Payne’s Gray
With watercolor it’s all about laying down washes and […]

I thought I’d write about the school workshop I took called “repeats”.
Repeats are something almost every piece of fabric uses. What are they? If you pull out a piece of fabric, open it up and look for a particular motif…then look for that particular motif again. You’ll see that it probably duplicates both vertically and […]

In this workshop the list of supplies included an open Stargazer Lily. I think the hardest part was transporting the flower and not spilling the container full of water! I’m glad to report that both the flower and I made it just fine.
We then placed the flower and vase in front of us, took out […]

One of our next assignments uses crayons. These aren’t like Crayola crayons but actually Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Artists’ Crayons. They are along the same lines as the water soluble colored pencils (if you’ve ever tried those) only in a crayon format. I actually had a set I’d gotten years ago which was swell because […]

I got to check something off of my homework list - yeah!! This assignment was “abstract scribble”. We started by drawing shapes with a rather large marker on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. We drew about a dozen or so - each on a separate piece of paper.
We then took all of […]

The next workshop I got to check off my school list was watercolor branches.
I find that I really am biased towards watercolor - I love it. I love the feel of the colors, layering one on top of another, building the lights to mediums to darks, finishing by adding the detail. Using good quality brushes […]

Up until now all of our designs for school have been painted in gouache - an opaque watercolor. I’d never really painted with gouache - there’s a bit of a learning curve, which I’m still struggling with but am making progress.
Anyway, this past workshop we worked on watercolor flowers - in particular a rose (we […]

Textural brocade - the latest in the list of school workshops - was lots of fun, a bit time consuming but I think the end result came out cool.
We started by painting our ground and then with scrunched up paper towels created the background. Someone was able to procure some towels from a gas station […]

This workshop was “dry brush”. The technique is usually used with tropical fabric - big flowers and leaves… maybe even loud Hawaiian shirts. :)
It was actually the hardest workshop to date. Again we started with reference but geeze, getting those paint strokes to look “dry”. I found myself getting frustrated - I thought I was […]