Time Being Creative and Prismatic Designs

I have plenty to work on in the sewing room, but it's been a high of about 15 degrees lately (about -11 for my Celsius friends) and the sewing room gets super-cold as there is only one heating vent out in the hallway. The space heater can hardly compete with the drafty window up there from the 20s either. Needless to say it's been to my advantage to staying downstairs sketching in little notebooks my friend Jena made through her brand, Time Being Creative. 

I feel like I stole this from a vintage crafts book, but this is really me! I'm wearing my Trafalgar dress design from a few months ago.

 Here, I'm just making notes of the length of a top and did a quick sketch of the item I'm planning on cutting soon with patterns I made from the Judy Dress. 

(Follow Jena @timebeingcreative on Instagram to see more of her notebooks she's making from vintage books/recycled papers.)

Although I love designing and making clothing, I've been a bit more inspired recently by the mandalas I was starting on a few years ago. Sometimes, you just need to do something else to get the inspiration flowing again. Mandalas always seem to remind me of the psychedelic 60s era - perhaps in textile form- such as this print I found through Google.

 

Ok, this lady isn't wearing a mandala-esque print, just imagine her in the aforementioned print though. You see where I'm going! 

So one winter in 2010 when I was super-depressed overall and feeling down about my fashion design skills, I started working on symmetrical art pieces like this:

By 2011 I morphed into doing more mandala-esque ones, like this one. These are actually not unlike a very repetitive pattern making for fashion design process. Doing these helped me greatly and are quite meditative.

Aaaand here is one I finished inking last night!

 I'm about to color it in with watercolor pencils soon, like the rest of them.

I tend to have a little more of a folk-art bent with mine. You can get crazy-complicated with them or you can just chill out on them. I've finally zeroed it down to a process of dividing up a circle into 6 pieces by drawing 3 lines across the diameter of the circle to the edge of the bristol board I work on. I'll start in the middle with a circle or shape and progress from there, repeating shapes by tracing onto tracing paper, then back onto bristol board working outwards in a circle. This one here took about 3-4 hours to do.

I've also been toying with the idea of making them into a repeat to print onto fabric but I'm not exactly sure yet. It's a cool idea though.

 This prismatic (which I refer  to as the larger ones that are symmetry-based) is one I'm a little stuck on, though it's near-completion. I think it just needs more shading in the watercolor pencil as I tend to do about 2-3 watercolor pencil processes on them anyhow.

It definitely has that late 60's vibe goin' on though obviously the Victrolas are much earlier. The prismatics get a little more motif-y which I like. 

So this is what's been occupying my time lately! I'll post progress photos on them and perhaps by the end of the week, I'll brave the freezing sewing room and cut out/make that top I was sketching out!