Winter Inspirations - Bleak to Bright

Sketches, designs and photographs from January 2018

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HAMILTON HOUSE - SOUTH BERWICK

Living sanely through a Maine winter can be tough, and it helps a whole heck of a lot to find breaks in the weather that allow outside play time.  At the start of the January thaw, there was an entire warm(ish) day completely filled with fog, which makes for wonderful and possibly haunting images! Fog is by far, one of my favorite outdoor situations to shoot in, although I tend to strangely crave bright colors shortly after. 
I set out to hike around South Berwick, Maine with the intention of photographing the river, trees and the gardens against the thick fog.  When I arrived at the Hamilton House, the stillness and quiet drew me to the house itself and away from the river, I just love the timeless quality of the grays in the images.

The best capture at the end of the day was definitely the image of Hamilton House.
Very little post production of the image was needed, the warm air and fog gave my lens a natural "tilt shift" and the blur on the left side and the colors subdued themselves in the thick fog.  I made a slight crop and alignment in photoshop and uploaded the final image to  the "Places in Maine" folder that I just opened up on erinthomas.art
I am hoping on adding more photographs to that folder as I visit my favorite local places for inspiration, I would love to hear what places in Southern Maine inspire you!

TIME TO BRIGHTEN THINGS UP

After a few days of fog, another snow storm and too many short cold days spent mostly indoors,  I was ready for some color and more outdoor time.   This week, the day after yet another snow storm...  the sky is beaming bright blue and the temperature is moderate, the dog needed exercise as much as I did, so we set out for a hike in the woods to find some inspiration for a new fabric pattern....
and some new color combinations to play with.
My goal of locating exciting things within the woods wasn't difficult,  the dog said we just need to follow the animal tracks to locate the most interesting things!
The colors that were available were easy to find against the stark white backdrop.

SKETCHBOOK PAGE 1.18.18

The 'eyedropper tool'  in Illustrator CS6 is an incredible feature to extract swatches of the colors I am attracted to.  I also set up a design board in Illustrator to "play" with my scanned sketches and images.

I kept the final designs simple by edited down to just the leaf patterns

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I am finding the bright colors and patterns very soothing during the long winter months!

I uploaded the final design to erinthomasart on redbubble to give it a test run, if you'd like to check it out click the pillow image above or visit my site CLICK HERE or click the images below for each product