I created this “Vintage Everyday Object Pattern” last Autumn when I was taking my first “Folio Focus” class. You can have a look at the website “Rise Design and Shine” if you’re interested in taking this class to expend your portfolio.

The title for this week’s assignment is “Granny’s Attic” and the idea is you need to develop an illustration or pattern inspired by toys/teddy bears or everyday objects. So I thought about the many vintage objects my grandma owns and used this as inspiration for this pattern.

I decided to use “Granny’s Attic” as my main inspiration point. I didn’t entirely follow the brief and mood board as that won’t be “me” because I’m from Taiwan and my grandmother is an old Chinese lady who is originally from “Guangdong” and you definitely won’t find any teddy bears in her attic or bedroom.

I have to tell you a little bit about my grandmother as this assignment and my interpretation is about her.

She is a lovely and nice lady who is full of energy. Seriously! She has more social events than me. She is that kind of person who does morning exercises with a friend, English class lunchtime, tea party with her friends in the afternoon and probably have two hours of karaoke after tea. She is that kind of old person I want to be when I get old. She’s always happy because she said life is too short to be unhappy.

She means a lot to me so I illustrated a lot of objects that I would find in her bedroom or kitchen for this assignment. One of my grandmother’s “must have” item is the white flower oil. Have you ever watched the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”? Do you remember the father in this film always use Windex for every pain and every skin problems or pimple outbreak. My grandmother is like that with her White Flower Oil. So when I think about my grandmother the first thing pop in my mind is the “White Flower Oil”. Second thing is the “Tiger Balm” and the reason is similar to the “White Flower Oil”.

This time I choose “Grey” colour as my background colour. I rarely use “grey or neutral” colours in my illustrations but one of the lessons I learnt from joining Lilla Roger’s Global Talent Search competition is it’s good to use 1 or 2 neutral colours in your illustrations. So I want to use this opportunity to challenge myself to use the colour I don’t use before and I have to say I really like what I created!

I really enjoy creating any kind of work for “art licensing” whether it be patterns, greeting cards or whatever. I feel like being able to play around with my own ideas and use my own time allows me to produce better work. It’s like having a creative holiday. Of course I love working for clients and receiving different briefs but it’s always nice to do something personal as well.

But I have to say nowadays, maybe because I’ve been working as an illustrator for few years now so I have gained more creative freedom from my customers and my customers trust my creative instinct.

I’ve also used this pattern to make some mock-up products and hopefully one day I can license this pattern and see them on real life products one day.