After last summer’s challenging and fulfilling home decor class with Lilla Rogers, I decided I would take one of those classes again, and here I am at the end of week 1 of Make Art That Sells part A, generally shortened in MATS A. Unlike the home decor class that focuses on one new substrate each week (metal, ceramic…), the weekly focus of this one is a a different type of market every time (children’s picture books, wall art…).

Week 1 was about the bolt fabric market, and our assignment was to create a pattern around the theme pasta and vintage Pyrex. Even though I only ended up using elbow pastas in my final pattern, I spent some time drawing every type of pasta I had on hand, and even bought some I don’t generally use, and yes, this assignment often made me hungry.

I had something colorful in mind, but what I also had in mind was a 1950s aesthetic, and if you look at patterns from that time, they all feature very limited color palettes. So I tried to reduce the number of colors and keep them in a certain range, but I still felt it didn’t quite work.

I ended up removing one color after the other until I only had one yellow left in an ocean of neutrals. I used textures to add some dimension to the piece, once again using Kyle Webster’s Photoshop brushes, and here’s the rather minimalist result, with one main pattern and two possible coordinates. Less is more?