Unexpected addition to Tonal Tropics


Today I finished an unexpected addition to my collection Tonal Tropics! I had no intentions to add to the project as it had been such a success as a set of 3 and I have now closed my shop so many seem pretty pointless, never the less, I present to you, Big Blue! 🐘💙🌿

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So this piece originally started as a response to @george.j.tonks draw this in your style challenge, but I ended up getting carried away… I’ve actually never done a DTIYS challenge but I saw George’s and thought why not! Finding inspiration right now is super hard so I’m glad I was able to find it and power through to make an illustration I’m really happy with 🥰

First Packaging Project

As part of my aims for 2021 and the UK’s third national lockdown, I decided to try and learn some new ways to contextualise my illustrations, one of the main goals being to create packaging. I thought I’d start with luxury chocolate packaging, as I adore chocolate and luxury branding gives me the option to go above and beyond as price point isn’t the main concern!

Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been gaining inspiration, watching tutorials, making plans and putting some ideas into practice. My initial inspiration was from ‘CO-OP Irresistible’ dark chocolate packaging, which features some gorgeous surrounding illustrations. I then went to Instagram and of-course Pinterest to see what else excited me.

Then almost overwhelmed with options and inspiration, I decided the best thing to do was simply to start! However I quickly came across many obstacles, including whats size to create the canvas, how to make a net and what text is essential to food packaging. I found a few helpful tutorials on Skillshare, but my biggest obstacle was getting use to Adobe Illustrator again. Despite Adobe Illustrator being the first Creative cloud platform I learnt to use, I have predominately used Photoshop for my illustrations for the last 4 years, so I’ve become scarily unfamiliar with the programme and have acknowledged I have to relearn almost everything, adding an extra challenge to the tasks I’ve set for myself! Although I acknowledge better understanding of all Adobe programmes will make more employable and adaptable to different briefs, it’s still a real pain, especially amidst a pandemic as I find it very difficult to learn from videos rather than trail and error with a real human at hand to answer any questions!

Despite this I still cracked on, learnt a few things, made my first draft and even mocked it up onto a 3D visualiser! To do this, I took apart an existing chocolate box to make a similar net, and then created a design for the front and sides experimenting for type and layout using both Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve left the back for now as it mostly consists of the ‘boring bits’. I’ll come back to it once I’ve got more of a consistent collection together and when I’m a little more confident with Illustrator.

I’m not completely thrilled with the design, but I acknowledge it’s still the early stages of the project, and it’s all a learning curve. So instead of obsessing over this one design, I think I’ll move on to the next and come back to this one when necessary.

Patterns Practice

If you’ve followed my work for a while you may remember my animal patterns project which I did in my first year of university. I really enjoyed the project and achieved one of the best grades out of my whole time at uni! However, as it was so early on, I wanted to try out the many areas of illustration and continue to develop my style, so I didn’t go back to it much, until now 😏 you may also remember from this project my obsession with frogs lol.... so to honour that, my first pattern practice to get back into the swing of things is of course featuring my favourite muse 🐸

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 To see all my patterns work so far visit https://www.maryflorahart.co.uk/patterns

I used Dylan Mierzwinski’s tutorial on Skillshare to remind myself of the tile pattern technique, which was super helpful! 

I’m going to make a story highlight on my Instagram of illustrations you can screenshot and use as phone backgrounds in order to make use of all of these practice pieces! Hopefully a little further down the line I will start mocking them onto products and pitching them to companies.

Let me know what you want to see be made into a pattern next!

2021 update!

Right now we’re in the UK’s third national lockdown, so it’s no surprise that we aren’t doing great. Personally, I’m happiest when productive but I acknowledge just existing right now is such a challenge however I’ve decided after a few weeks of being incredibly unmotivated to pick up the slack and to stop being miserable by setting myself some goals to keep me focused and hopefully I can at-least feel I’m gaining something from sitting at home for almost a year!

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Soooo first of all I’m temporarily closing my shop to focus more on editorial work and hopefully gain some merchandise partnerships to reach a wider audience and also get my work onto different products rather than just prints! Also my Squarespace subscription is almost coming to an end and I don’t want to pay the extra bit for an online shop rn🥲 SO in order to clear some stock and start fresh this new year I’m running a big ol’ SALE! 🌟 

Quite a lot is already sold out so be quick if you have your eye on something! Just enter the code NEWYEAR40 at the checkout for a whopping 40% off anything and everything ✨ until the 11th of Jan ✨ 

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I’m pretty confident in my illustrations skill alone but when it comes to anything remotely related or graphic design-ey I’m useless. So I’ve decided to focus on 3 areas, which I feel will all work together and in general improve my overall design expertise! 👩🏼‍💻 

These are:

  • patterns, which I’ve done before and absolutely loved

  • packaging, which I’ve vaguely dabbled in

  • and typography which I absolutely despise because I’m so horrendous at it but 100% recognise its value.

To start, I made two text based posts to announce my 2021 goals and sale for my Instagram, I felt this was a good test of the waters! It’s definitely not the best, but it does the job.

Watch this space to see if I can keep up this motivation and stick with these 3 goals😙✌🏻