Two weeks ago I received an email from the Marketing Manager at Kildonan Place Shopping Centre (here in Winnipeg). The first of two murals I had designed over a year ago was ready to be revealed! I was pretty excited, but also a little terrified. As someone who usually draws at a fairly small scale, I was nervous to see my drawings at a size that was, well, larger than life!

As soon as I made the announcement to my husband, he came up with the idea to go take a look that evening. We arrived a few hours later, camera in hand. Thanks to my amazing hubby, who set out to direct me where to stand, we got some pretty nice pics of me in front of my design (purely for scale, of course). I’m not usually one for having my picture taken, but I will share a few of the best ones with you here. We had some fun taking them!

Seeing my design on a 91 foot long wall felt pretty surreal, but I’ll say it looks pretty cool in person. If you live in Winnipeg and are ever around the KP Mall, go check it out by the Save-On Foods entrance! The second mural design is set to be revealed sometime later this summer.

I am at a place in my career where I am trying to figure out what the next thing looks like… These past few months have been exciting (opening my Etsy shop, designing and producing new products for it, focusing on developing a consistent style, sharing more art with the world), but when it comes to more practical uses for my art, I get a little lost. The business side of things has always left me feeling overwhelmed. Hey, I’m only human, right?

I stumbled across Bonnie Christine one day, after going down a “bunny trail” on Instagram (sorry, I couldn’t resist 🐰). She was offering a free workshop about surface pattern design. Surface pattern design?! I remembered learning about that back in school for a few brief weeks, and I remembered LOVING it. How come I had forgotten about it? I decided to sign up for Bonnie’s workshop to learn a bit more and refresh my memory further.

Bonnie only got me excited… excited about possibilities! Here I had been feeling so lost… Now I had all these ideas for patterns floating around in my head, and I was imagining them on all sorts of things. Bonnie had left me feeling so inspired, and I knew after taking her workshop that this was something that I wanted to do.

So this leads me to today… Today I signed up for Immersion 2022 (Bonnie’s 8 week intensive all about getting started in the surface design industry). The course is laid out in a way that covers so much information in such a short period of time. It has three weeks of content focused on working in and designing patterns in Illustrator (I’m so looking forward to a refresher in Illustrator… I have gotten rusty!), one week focused on how to create artwork in collections (rather than one-off pieces which I seem to be stuck in doing), and two weeks focused more on the business side of things (which, let’s face it, I need some guidance in)! Bonnie even allows for a couple weeks between modules just for implementing what you are learning. This is so thoughtful and indicative of how much Bonnie understands the creative process. I know I will need that extra time to absorb all that information and create artwork for my first collection.

This course seems to have fallen in my lap at just the right time, and with the support of my amazing husband and family behind me, I can’t wait to get started! I’m looking forward to learning all that I can about surface pattern design and growing more as an artist as well as building confidence in my ability as a creative entrepreneur. I feel at peace knowing that this is the next step in my creative journey. I look forward to keeping you updated along the way! ☺️

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