In my Wildflowers Collection blog post, I talked about my ambition of getting my illustrations printed on a wide range of products such as functional wares and textiles. For Christmas I decided to try something different than designing a new set of cards and gift tags.
I wanted to reuse some of the illustrations from last year’s Christmas card designs, which I really love! I came to the idea of printed wood hanging decorations and started to visualise my lemon and clementine illustrations being printed on die cut wood. I painted eight more festive designs to go with them.
As it is an entirely new type of product for me, I found myself in the deep end and had to learn quickly. I couldn’t visualise the size of my decorations so I had to make paper prototypes. It’s important for me to understand what the end result might look like in real life - even if it is just a badly printed paper cut-out! I experimented for a bit, tweaking the designs and choosing a perfect size for each piece.
While I designed my decorations, I looked for manufacturers and compared unit prices, which was a long process. After several weeks, I finally found a supplier I was completely happy with and ordered my first run! I was very nervous during the production but I was also very excited about the potential.
When they arrived, as always I let out a little happy shriek and gave myself a minute to let the excitement settle. As the illustrations are directly printed on the surface of wood, they look beautifully textured - the wood grain coming through the print of my original painting works really nicely!
They come with fabric ribbons in red, green, gold or cream colour. It’s a great feeling finally completing my decorations with ribbons - I have been working on them for a while and I am very proud of how they have turned out!
Comments
These are so lovely Katrina! All the effort paid off :)