My Tea Towel Design for Spoonflower
A week ago I was surprisingly announced as a finalist in first contest as a graphic designer. I’ve received an e-mail telling me that my Tea Towel Design was among the top 10 finalists in Spoonflower contest. Yeah!!!
I decided to participate in one of the weekly contests by Spoonflower but firstly what is Spoonflower? Spoonflower is a website where you can upload your designs (usually patterns) and print them in fabric, wallpaper or gift paper. They have a huge community as well so you can also print other designers designs. They are located in US but they ship anywhere around the world.
I found Spoonflower by chance when I was looking for a company able to print some designs for my clothing company LadyUmbrella, searching the web I saw their weekly contest (with a different theme every week).
I decided to give it a go because I had a little bit of time and because I loved the theme for the contest that week: “Moms Recipe Tea Towels”
The contest was asking for a design with one of your mum’s recipes. From the beginning at I had clear that I wanted ingredients with bright colours to give a very eye catching tea towel, my mum’s recipes weren’t ideal for it.
On the other hand Spanish food is not as well known as Italian, Mexican or Chinese food, so my chances of winning the contest might have been reduced due to that reason.
Tea Towel Design – The Process
I decided to use my boyfriend’s mum’s recipe, he is Irish and so was his mum. She was a great cook and she had lots of great recipes but I decided to use her Tomato Soup recipe because the ingredients were perfect to create a bright tea towel, ingredients with reds, oranges and greens colours will do perfectly.
Firstly I hand drew every ingredient (tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, carrots, olive oil, salt and pepper), then I scanned the illustrations and proceeded to draw them with Illustrator CS. I then added the colours digitally and the last thing to do was to add the text.
The font in the design is called “Skinny”, I don’t use it regularly but it is very handy when you need to create something with a casual look.
Although I didn’t win the contest I’m very happy to be among the top 10 finalists (it was my first contest!) Also the tea towel is on sale on Spoonflower and it is selling quite well. I love the idea of people using my tea towel design in their kitchen.
I decided to participate in another contest again…. so wish me luck
