African Designs

This week's Spoonflower challenge spurred me on to look at my drawings and photos from our recent trip to Zambia. I loved the whole idea of using a folk art style for this tea-towel design. It just seemed right. The colour palette came together easily from a mixture of folk art research and collections of photographs. I'm looking forward to designing a whole collection of patterns for children from this.

When I first looked at the tea towel challenges on Spoonflower for this month I honestly didn't find them very appealing and thought they probably weren't for me. But I guess that's the whole point of a challenge. You find yourself researching art forms and genre that you wouldn't previously have considered looking at. I love the way folk art has no rules. This design appears symmetrical, but it's not. The drawing is naive, yet accomplished. The design seems haphazard, or cute, but it's deliberate. This definitely won't be my last attempt at folk art