Being an illustrator and working from home can sometimes feel a little lonely. I do have my family and friends but still I find myself longing for the company of other creators and creatives. I try to meets my illustrator-designer-creative friends face to face whenever I can. These days, thanks to the web and the communities evolving around web courses, I can even broaden my tribe across the ocean. A nice example to the growing community of creators around the globe I found i

One of the things I love about the MATS course I'm taking this month (1, 2) is exploring of new markets. This week we studies and illustrated for the scrapbooking market. I find this market fascinating. The culture of scrapbooking is very rare here but there is a great tradition of keeping memories alive and transferring memories to the next generation. This is done publicly mostly by the ways we celebrate the holydays, ceremonies, names of places, stamps and memorial statue

As I wrote I love to keep on learning and I always find new way to do that. Lately I was taking part in an exciting e-course taught by Lilla Rogers, one of the world's top illustration agents. The purpose of this course is to build a professional portfolio while learning about lucrative markets for art. Last week we learned about the paper market which is one of my favorites markets and illustrated a winter holiday card. This week the focus was baby/children’s apparel & déco

A winter holiday card I designed lately, I love doing winter theme illustration when spring is around the corner! Actually, I enjoy drawing winter all year long. I'm planning to use the other elements in this presentation to make more designs. Maybe I'll make a whole collection of cards or even repeat patterns for wrapping paper. What do you think? I'd love to hear from you

In the last couple of posts I showed the different parts of the Sweet Pattern Collection (1, 2, 3) that started as a clip art set and developed to a large pattern collection. Today I'd like to share the last pieces of the collection, three geometric (abstract) patterns that show the effect of background color, size and direction on the feel of a pattern. Sweet Geometric Pattern A Sweet Geometric Pattern B Sweet Geometric Pattern C

I kept making some conversational (novelty) coordinates for the Sweet Pattern Collection. But unlike the last patterns I made, some of those new patterns can almost be understood as geometric or abstract. Sweet Hearts Pattern Sweet Words Pattern Sweet Sprinkles Pattern Sweet Confetti Pattern

You may remember I wanted to make some conversational (novelty) coordinates for the Sweet Pattern Collection. I wanted them to work in a smaller scale then the last patterns I made and change the spacing between the icons. Sweet Balloons Pattern Sweet Gifts Pattern Sweet Ribbons Pattern Sweet Strawberries Pattern

A few months ago I made a clip art set called sweet birthday that got really good responses. Since I liked its theme, icons and color palette I decided to use them for a new pattern collection. I wanted to make a large collection that will contain not only the icons I took from the set but also new ones I draw especially for the new project. I had a desire to design quite a lot of coordinates and combine both conversational (novelty) patterns and geometric (abstract) patterns