As with the Explore Florals course I took with Victoria Johnson earlier in the year, I've learned a ton in her Create Collections class.

As someone who's changed careers, it's incredibly helpful to have a person with deep experience in the field share what they know - it's one thing to make the work, it's another to understand the needs of art directors as they look for art for their products. I love having my own line, and am always working on adding to it, but it's also important to know how to create work for other clients. 

Having spent more than 20 years as a broadcast producer (more than 20 years! More than is more like 24, in fact!), working primarily on broadcast design and promo projects for cable networks (lots of A&E, and History, and Discovery, with the occasional advertising or corporate project thrown in here and there), I understand that each field has its own industry specs that someone just jumping in can't know, so to have that insight from this course is huge.

We've been putting together a key piece, then deriving secondary artwork to go with that piece, and finally, coordinates, which are those patterns that support the rest, though in a more subdued way.

The flowers in the vase painting above is the key piece, from which the rest of the work is derived and inspired.

 Can you spot the reference in the key piece for this rose and moth pattern? 

 I had struggled quite a bit with my key piece to start, my painting felt very rigid and lacked energy, so stopped work on that to loosen up. This indigo painting is what I worked on to get back on track, and the painting here then influenced the details on the vase.

 This is one of the background players - or maybe more of a supporting cast member (to use a broadcast term!). Can you spot where this flower came from in the indigo pattern above? 

 And this flower is from the handle of the vase. There was a bit of clean-up needed, as the painting is, naturally, not in layers (though I could have painted the elements separately, I didn't in this case) , but I put some music on and erased paint for a bit, and now we have a pattern that reminds me of t-shirts I had back in college that may or may not have matched a tapestry I had. Oddly, I didn't listen to The Dead while doing this clean-up work - instead, I had Missy Elliot on. Hmmmm. 

And, finally, back to the beginning - I had so much fun painting the details on this vase, I've since been working on moths with loads of tiny details, and hope to have those ready to share with you next week.