Make Art That Sells Bolt Fabric Class. Make Art That Sells is a website with a number of illustration based classes run by Lilla Rogers. From the moment I discovered her classes I’ve been dying to join one and just over a week ago I bit the bullet and joined one.

I have been working as a freelance illustrator for roughly 5 years now and the projects I normally work on are children’s illustration, advertising, editorial and children’s books. I’ve always had a passion for home decor, pattern design, greeting card design and product design but I of course always want to learn more but sometimes you need some direction for these new things. Also time has been, and continues to an extent, a huge issue so when Make Art That Sells changed the course format from five intense weeks to “self-paced, this became perfect for me.

So I decided to start with MATS A self-paced class. This class targets a total of five different markets, which are: bold fabric, home decor, children’s book, wall art and the gift market. The reason I choose MATS A first because I really want to learn all the tips and information about creating fabric patterns, home decor, children’s book and majority of the markets mentioned in this course. So I decide to start with MATS A first. For some reason when I tried to create my own patterns before they never quite worked and I couldn’t figure out why but after just the first week of Lilla Rogers Make Art that Sells MATS A class everything clicked and I feel completely inspired.

In this course, we will have a mini exercise after each tutorial then you are given a brief for your assignment. In the bolt fabric mini exercise, everyone has to draw different shapes of pasta and casserole dishes.  If you follow my illustration blog/website or even my Instagram account you will know how much I love food illustrations and anything related to food and cooking. I had so much fun illustrating different kinds of pasta, casserole pans and anything related to this subject.

You can illustrate probably anything related to food and cooking in this bolt fabric pattern assignment. For my first bolt fabric pattern, I decided to use a reddish-orange colour for the background colour because this colour reminds me of pasta sauce. There is a restriction when designing fabric patterns for this class. If like me you use Adobe Illustrator as your medium then you can only use 5-10 colours on your patterns. I’ve shown the colours used I represented this in colour bubbles next to my logo on the last picture on this article.

Apart from the main pattern, I also created two co-ordinated patterns to accompany my main pattern. I took some elements from these patterns and also some of the colours so people will these are like a collection.

Before this class, I felt a bit alien in the illustration industry because of commission projects I got required my to create “icons” or “spot illustrations”. I love creating these kind of illustrations and they pay for my living but sometimes people will give you that kind of impression that because your illustrations lack a scene they have less value. The thing is a I can create illustrations with different scenes but currently the projects I’m working on are more like icons and spot illustrations. But after I learnt how to create bolt fabric design I’ve discovered these icons can be made into beautiful fabrics, wrapping papers and I’m absolutely loving creating all kinds of patterns.

Hope you like my first pattern collection. I’ve already created some products and designed some mock products that show you what these patterns look like on products. Once I’ve completed the whole course I’m going to spend some time to shape my pattern creating skills and create more patterns.

If you like my patterns and illustrations you can purchase different items on my redbubble, Artrookie and Society6.