New animal prints for Spring 2020

At the start of the year, I wanted to create prints that would potentially be formed of one colour only.

Having created single colour screen printed fabric designs for Alice to use as a background print for her purses a few years ago, I wanted to explore this further, and bring in an animal element too.

I was also interested in making the design to be intertwining; I created this sketch of the Brambles and Mice.

Designing one colour illustrations can create problems with creating a feeling of depth, so you need to create contrasting areas of light and shade to give interest. In this illustration, I developed this through the leaves, which have one half dark and the other light.

Brambles and Mice original sketch

Even though these are one colour designs, I printed it in two different colours, black and raspberry. I love the richness of the raspberry colour.

Brambles and Mice final print

I’ve wanted to create a print for a woodland deer for a while, and for it to be quite different from the two stag prints I’ve previously printed.

The illustration is something that I’ve sketched on many occasions but never taken any further.

You can see in the initial sketch, I originally planned on a scene with beech trees, bluebells, grass and water and even shafts of light. I worked the whole thing up into a finished illustration but wasn’t happy with it so started again.

Early deer print sketch

In the second sketch, you can see I’ve pared it down to bluebells intertwining around the deer plus some wood anemones. Again, like the Mice and Brambles, I added depth by creating contrast between the light and dark bluebells. I also used much more texture to the deer, to add depth and detail; the original design was much more simple. 

Bluebells and Deer sketch

Like the other print, this one is available in both black and this time, bluebell blue.

Bluebells and Deer final print