I have been really looking forward to doing this course, my dream would be to produce a line of home decor products and I have always wondered, what the different techniques are called and how to explain this on your artwork. The course is presented by Lilla and Margo Tantau, VP of Creative for MidwestCBK.

I started off the week feeling really excited, I wanted to produce some screen printed looking designs, fairly simple, but bold and contemporary. I have no screen print experience (although I am planning to do a course shortly in Bristol at Spike Studio's) so I played around with hand printing. The theme was birds, and I got crackin (as Lilla says) and produced some hand printed textures that I thought were ok, scanned them in and experimented in photoshop. By Wednesday I had a design that I really liked... but by Thursday I was not so keen :)

I am not sure why this is, but when I finish my art in photoshop, it always feels to me more traditional in styling and I was looking for a contemporary piece.

So my work started off like this...

and then it went to this...

there was still something that I wasn't sure about, it was bugging me, so I tried another...

On friday I had a complete re-think... I realised that my taste in home decor is quite different to my normal paper products/surface pattern design. I had recently moved back to Bath from North Yorkshire, where I was working as a greeting card designer for a big company, to set up my freelance business and my house needs some re-vamping, as it has been rented out for 5 years. I wanted to design some products that I could make for myself, to put in the house. My taste is quite natural when it comes to home decor, I like white walls with patterned accessories, adding life to the place ...muted cols, natural fabrics and wood, but still very contemporary.

I drew some very simple shapes of florals and birds, scanned them, live traced in illustrator and then I played around with the colour to produce a design that was more me!

I am much happier with this design and feel I learnt absolutely loads last week, not only about the process, but also about the way I work differently, on different products.

My final design...