Tula's House - Episode 2 - Drilling Down to the Details

so I pulled a few images that were just kind of felt like what was in my head I wouldn't normally do this image base wise I sort of decided on my animals and then close my eyes and sort of picture myself in a place but this is the first time I'm doing something about a place I haven't been and it's not really a place it's sort of an imaginary place based on the idea of sort of India in India and Morocco where I just really had this extreme desire to do something more exotic so I kind of just did some random searching of images and fountain things that not just had a graphic quality but maybe set a mood of what I'm trying to capture and a big part of what I was thinking about when I was thinking about doing this collection was like this kind of fantasy escape of just everything that's the opposite about the world that my personal reality and I love this picture because there's these two sort of regal people kind of Maharajah like jungle book looking people but they're like they're so angry they just look like they hate me but in a way that I want them to but like all that just the decadence it seems like every single surface is decorated in this kind of culture I mean they even paint their animals their elephants in there you know and it all means something and the tile worked and the flowers and the henna tattoos and the metalwork and the lanterns and and I've got sort of the main animals that I've chosen to incorporate in this collection so as I'm looking at like this weaving photo that I found which is probably from Mexico but it's not really the point it's not a real place that I'm trying to create here it's sort of the idea of a fantasy place and so I'm like taking this weaving like what can I do like how does that connect I mean this could I could weave this sort of Atlas moth in a way instead of just drawing it as it is I can weave it in graphically maybe with like an ECOT type design where the design is woven into the cloth or something like this where it's like loomed but created out of a series of lines or instead of just shapes I typically take an animal and then make it out of things out of shapes out of leaves out of design elements but what if all I gave myself was a straight line to work with could I still make this a recognizable form without this sort of crutch of a curve I don't know my mom is sort of your typical customer and my brother's super-modern so he's sort of tomorrow's customer so I'm always trying to find that middle ground you can't design too much for tomorrow because today no one will get it but you can't design just for today because tomorrow it'll suck you know home of it okay so it's new line time hasa what do we go cats whoa tiger lion you're a pattern designer I think the tiger with the tiger print has more uh you know this guy's got the wild mane the Fabio hair he's out I feel like hippo and rhino are sort of the same thing rhinos freaked me out there like weird wimpy Triceratops I'm kind of thinking they're both weird okay and then this is the other one I know we've done about that I have no idea what that is but it's freaking me out it was like a sign in your head like they always are wearing try those oh it's a butterfly that's lovely it's actually an Atlas moth okay this is what's cool about this though like it's enough like shape and pattern that I can do something with it but it's actually not a butterfly it's an Atlas moth they're like in real life they're like this big so I printed out a bunch of other pictures of different animals that sort of live in the same environment so if we go Tiger than cheetahs out two cheetahs out you okay yeah uh you're gonna be like the main well I really think that I can do a lot with an elephant yeah I guess it's sort of a big like round bulbous shape that I can fill with a lot of stuff yeah weirdo it's the bulbous but I think I can do a lot with like his ears in the trunk like there's some curve and not that I can work with love you fill in the ears and yeah we're cool and it's a bunch of coal and it's an interesting shape that's recognizable so with a tiger and elephant I mean that's sort of setting up a story already so I mean I'm thinking like I don't want - go - like I kind I'm kind of thinking like India spice market Jungle Book okay jungle bookish where Mowgli that's your favorite book is how is it when I was going on I also think lots of things like zebra except zebra hanger bow straight Clash it has to be one of the other and I just did Fox filled with the horses you're right I've never done a big cat before or instead of any kind let's - um yeah save the zebra for another well cuz he's awesome okay some cool stripes in there but yeah I get that and I feel like this is too limited to like it's a black-and-white with a black-and-white stripe horse you don't do okay I don't do black and white nothing that has to be black and white but I don't know I don't see that one so that's kind of what I'm thinking I mean what do you guys think I think there's I mean there's other things I can work in but I don't want it to be like I don't know like the Wild Animal Park in San Diego I just I just need something to focus in on right and I feel like I already have the tiger which has a lot of fur monkeys are tough to make you young kids are really I think monkeys are being easy to make they either go really childish or super creepy Oh turtle I just picture going great creepy ring I don't think they do that ice cream of to do they do did I scream at you I hope they just threw poo that's him mom she owned a quilt shop for over a decade a really beautiful beautiful quilt shop that she opened before she had the twins and then after she had the twins well I've got real real real quick though so she was trying to decide you know what her next move was and and it was kind of the same thing it's like I'm traveling all the time now and you know just the setup to travel just the back-and-forth you know goes on for days and it was taking up so much of my time and she's like a great organizer and she loves events and party planning and all that stuff I'm like why don't you party play in my life giraffes are super weird you have no you do they could be so cute it's such a weird shape though and I've already got that I don't know okay we'll keep this I'm like the the B group a giraffe could eventually because of his long legs and long neck make a super cool stripe it could make a cool stripe I've thought of that before no I thought of that before but it would have to be like a border stripe and it could be clone like okay okay we'll keep this on the B team yeah okay what animals that I'm not oh I can so no it's like an antelope or like a okay don't even know okay I feel like butterfly such an easy go-to because there's it's such an ambiguous shape as long as it's got two symmetrical wings in a center body you can do anything with it but if we do this I can also bring back the butterfly quilt pattern oh we haven't done in a long time so ever since then no that makes it up mate there I mean there's no reason to bring back the butterfly quilt pattern based on tigers and elephants but if I throw this in there I can bring that pattern back and make that relevant again yeah I think that's a great idea plus I also think you know you've got this may not make any difference but you've got ground animals and now you've got something that can be it you know in the air higher a good point mom I try so hard occasionally it occasional good I do that key please you know so everyone in my family is really talented at whatever it is that they do and so I'm really lucky in that way that I'm kind of surrounded by people who have to love me that are also really good at things you know how does it say like how you could have different like a main focal and then more like a secondary one yeah this you said this is large a large in real life so that I'd be cool you can play with the scale yeah okay cam yeah what do you think like as far as like our followers and people would they is this too far out for them or is there no such thing I don't think there's it's too far out I think they put your their trust in you to design what you want to design and so I think if you want to design that I think that's what we should do okay and what about I mean do you think that it it's relevant right now like I reserve I think Tigers um I think it's on it's on trend without being too on-trend like you know because we do work what 18 months out so but I don't think Tigers are we played out by the time that comes out I think it'll be right on target I mean because there's like all this southwestern stuff happening right now that I don't want to touch no um so I'm trying to get around that yeah that makes sense okay I definitely would want something with giant tiger faces and elephants on it so you would sleep they want that from you they expect it from you they don't want you know they expect whoa I can't believe this she did it again thanks mom I went to school for graphic design and illustration and I wanted to be an illustrator which is essentially just somebody who draws pictures with a point essentially so like as opposed to maybe a painter her fine artist who is maybe thinking more sort of conceptually an illustrator is somebody who draws with the intent of communicating something very specific so it tends to be more of a commercialized field because I never really saw myself as like a true fine artist and I'm considered myself more of a storyteller not that that's not also fine art but fine art was a little too broad for me illustration was a little more specific and I'm drawing pictures that represent something very specific in order to sell a very specific story there's a sort of more of a commercial aspect to illustration so you're intentionally making a product to sell or illustrating something that goes on a product to sell so it's a little bit more of this I've always kind of been on both sides of I've been very interested in art but also very interested in the business of art and that's a really strong part of my personality and my process is that I'm really trying to sell something at the end of the day and by double majoring in graphic design and illustration I'm able to both draw the picture but then package it to sell as well for me I want my fabrics to communicate something so I could very easily just draw flowers and incorporate supporting stripes and dots and those things and I do that in a way but I'm always looking for something that takes it somewhere else like you know I'm always thinking like why would somebody buy this over something else like why would they choose this fabric and you know it might be because they love elephants or it might be because they a loathe elephants I don't know but at least there's something to talk about so I'm trying to draw a picture but it's a different way of drawing a picture because I'm not just illustrating to be put in a frame or put on a book cover or be printed on a piece of paper or a page in a children's book let's say I'm drawing something that needs to interlock with identical drawings of itself in order to create a field of design so right now I'm drawing an elephant I knew that was going to be an important part from when I did the mood board and when I talked with my mom and my brother I knew that an elephant was going to come up in this and what I'm trying to do with this elephant is I could just draw an elephant just get a picture of an elephant and draw an elephant but if I feel like if you want a photo of an elephant you're better off taking a picture of it and drawing it so as an illustrator I'm able to take and what I'm attempting to do is to take all these little sort of graphic elements and shapes that come up in you know I've got leaves I have sort of swirl pieces I have some geometric little triangles and I'm taking all those shapes and composing them a lot like music into something that resembles the shape of an elephant so it's an elephant but sort of the next stage of what an elephant can be or a different way of looking at an elephant so all these sort of shapes come together to make an elephant that isn't actually one but yeah so it's the shape of something you recognize composed of pieces that you don't recognize everybody I work with is absolutely not gonna tolerate an ego so but really I mean um I stay off off the internet almost completely unless it's my own stuff you know I post a Facebook and everything but those are mostly postings and because you can there's only two things that can happen you're they're going to read good things about yourself and then spend the rest of day walking around like you're the greatest person on earth or you're going to read bad things about yourself and then you're going to walk around the rest of the day like hating everything because you know you can hear a hundred compliments and they'll never equal up to that one criticism you know for whatever reason that weighs more than all other things so I just stay out of it really and you know I kind of set up for myself early on the fastest way I mean I've watched a lot of designers come and go and the quickest way to bring down a great designer is when they get it in their head that what they do is flawless so I'll take elements from this elephant and you know maybe I have some pieces in here like this sort of leaf design on a stem and I'll start bringing that into a coordinating piece over here so I'm just trying to take some of the shape so I you know in the main pieces I've started to create a dialogue of shape so you know I say that leaves look like this and flowers look like this and you know are they more stylized or like you know more graphic and made of shapes or are they more realistic and shaded so I'll start to bring whatever the language of what really created in the main pieces and start to bring those into the coordinating pieces and I'm basically just pulling sort of little fragments of the main pieces out and spreading them out across the supporting prints so that everything is still speaking the same language even if it's not the same exact design and I might color them slightly differently you know I might take like a full-color piece from a main print and make it a two color piece in a supporting print so it's still saying the same things but they're serving different purposes for the culture so that you know the main goal is I'm still drawing and illustrating and doing all these things but I also want the end quilter to have what they need to make a quilt and also for me because I'm going to have to work with this for six months so I need to make sure I have everything I need so when I'm creating my supporting prints I'm thinking what am I going to need as as a piece or a quilter I'm going to need smaller prints that I can use to accent some of these larger prints so I want them to coordinate and be speaking the same language but I don't necessarily want everything looks to look like it was all pulled out of the same box you know I want the quilter and myself to look like I put these fabrics together based on my own choices not like a designer picked all these fabrics out they all look exactly the same so I want them to be similar but not exactly the same all the way through so that it looks more like happenstance a little bit so that it looks like maybe somebody went into a shop and and selected these fabrics from different parts of the store and put them together and they just magically all look fantastic next to each other and a lot of that happens with color at this stage of the drawing I am starting to think about color but I'm not putting a ton of attention up into it I'm thinking about color in the way that I might take my pencil and darken in certain areas so I'm really thinking about value more than actual color like I'm not thinking red blue yellow pink green I'm thinking this is going to be a darker print this is going to be a lighter in color or this is going to have more contrast or this is going to have less contrast so you know I've already started even on this elephant print I've already sort of written myself a note here that says elephant all black with detail or like it was cut from paper so I know that I've made this note that I want it to look like it's almost like a stencil so I want it to look like maybe all these little pieces were cut from a single piece of paper and because I know that with this piece having so much detail I'm going to soften all that detail by making it only a limited amount of colors like in this small floral drawing I want this to have more dimension to it because it's a smaller print where this elephant is large and it's bold and it's graphic so it can have more detail and less color I don't need it to be three-dimensional it can be really flat for feedback ah I better not be getting feedback from my mom and Cameron are I mean it's it's invaluable to me because they're seeing the drawings in a way that I don't see them so this is the elephant oh it was a monkey it's not a wood it's so dead I thought okay it's an elephant but how do you see a monkey in that it's an elephant there's a trend so when she comes to look at a drawing I did of an elephant that is now precious to me because I've invested so much time in it and the first thing she says is she sees a monkey you know like that's a huge problem for me you you

Channel: Quilt Videos

Views: 96,960

Rating: 4.8919687 out of 5

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Id: z5RIVyfuLOw

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2016