Trends Workshop

Over the past few weeks, I took a terrific online course: Design Garden's 2015 Trends Workshop. It's an intense class that teaches you how to incorporate current and upcoming trends into your illustration and graphics. This is the second Design Garden class that I've taken. Last year I did the Foundation Vector Hand-Drawn Graphics class, which was also outstanding!

The Trends Workshop was four weeks long, and we created a new piece of work each week (I took the "live" version of the class, but it is also offered now as a self-paced course).

I absolutely loved learning about upcoming trends, how to do background research and work with inspiration boards, and how to combine trends to make them my own.

Here are a couple of examples of pieces I created during the course:

This is my clip art set inspired by the "Chic Modernist" and "Mosaic" trends. I wanted to create images that are quiet & (a little bit) elegant, but still in my style.

And for something a little different, here's what I came up with using the "Cartoon" and "Pop Art" trends. 

As you can see, the class really helped me to experiment & to bring out different sides of my art personality. :) 

Most importantly, the Trends Workshop taught me a totally new way to approach my projects — my head is spinning with new ideas! I loved it & can't recommend it enough!