If you subscribe to the newsletter for White Bear Center for the Arts, one of my local art centers, you might have seen a new fabric featured. I had a really fun time working with WBCA to make a custom fabric in celebration of their new branding and logo. They reached out after a class that I taught on digital fabric design and asked if I could do something for them. This is one of my favorite kind of projects! I’ve done fabrics for the Guthrie Theater Shop  and Darn Knit Anyway in the past few years.

For this design, the art center had a new palette of colors that were their new brand. I thought it would be fun to highlight those colors by making the rest of the design in black and white. I went to one of my very favorite art materials: security envelopes. If you aren’t familiar, security envelopes are the ones that your bank statement or utility bill comes in that have black and white patterns printed on the inside. I love those patterns. So I made 10 different tiny illustrations: painting, writing, sewing, weaving, clay, glass, metal, drawing, woodworking, and music. Each one has a close up of hands doing one of those crafts. I also hid the initials WBCA in 4 of the scenes, so it spells it out when the design is all put together.

I started this design with an idea of scenes in frames because of the new frame shape in their logo design and I wanted it to look like you are peeking in the windows to see what’s going on. Once I finished the paper illustrations, then I scan them and assemble the repeating pattern in Photoshop and add the bright colored frames.
It was a fun design to work on. They asked me to make artist tool bags, which are on sale in the WBCA shop now. We decided to do two sizes so one is good for pencils and markers and the other for larger tools and maybe a sketchbook. And they are printed on recycled canvas, which is made from recycled plastic bottles.