How to use this Page

A Provençal sunset. Aren't those colours amazing? Another lovely way of putting the year to bed before greeting the new one, isn't it? Cheers.

Sketched this out a few months back, actually, and I thought it would be perfect for this time of the year ... as it's time to let go of all the clutter and reorganize for the New Year.

Which is exactly what we're trying to do for the business (and personal life, not that I have much of one!). A lot has happened this past year and now we have to look back, reassess, and cut out what isn't working. Then cross the fingers and hope that the coming year will be even better than this one has been so far.

Are you letting go of clutter in preparation for the New Year? Any New Year's resolutions? I'm still working on those ... Cheers.

A bit of festive colour for the Christmas holidays. Cheers.

Wishing everyone out there a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Season's Greetings.

Be safe and be happy :)

I've no idea how this little sketch of candy canes transformed itself into a pattern ... I was just fooling around and well, this is what happened ...

I started off doodling some candy canes - no surprise, it being the festive season and all, and the mood of the moment:

Don't they look like they're dancing? I then decided to scan it in and just experiment a tiny bit, but got carried away. So, this happened ...

I then thought, oh well, I've gone this far, might as well add some stripes, a different background, etc. And a simple, cheerful collection emerged ...

Too late to put up on cards and gifts for this Christmas, I know, but watch out for it next year. I'm thinking it's going to look pretty cute on fabric and giftwrap, especially if I add polka dots somewhere along the line! Cheers.

Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays!

 Be safe and be happy. Cheers.

All in the spirit of gift-giving - some wrapped boxes I've drawn at different moments in the past to while away the little time I don't have :)

Drawn in coloured pencil, in my moleskine journal, just for fun. Cheers.

This was actually doodled some time ago. I've resurrected it and finally cleaned it up, so here are both the original Happy Birthday very rough text design sketch and the final cleaned up version I worked on this week:

I liked it! Curls and all. So I tried it out in some of the trend colours for next year, in Poppy Red, Dusk Blue and Emerald Green, to see how it would look ...

What do you think? Fun and cheerful? Would you buy those on cards for someone celebrating a birthday? I think I would ... so I'm going to put it up at the stores once the festive season celebrations are over with :) Cheers.

Taken while on the road in Provence, France.

Just another quick, messy, doodle ... flowers in a square-ish sized box. A bit too rigid in style to be made into patterns, perhaps. Will just leave it be as it is, in the Moleskine journal.

I'm trying to make time to draw/paint regularly. We've been so involved with work recently that this somehow made it's way to the bottom of my priorities list, when in fact it should be at the top for various reasons, not least being that it's super-therapeutic for me, and, hello, without art I really have no business to speak of!

As I have a long queue of designs and patterns waiting to be placed on gifts and cards on the stores, I actually now have the luxury of drawing whatever I please, without having to consider its commercial value. I know, I know, I shouldn't anyway -- but unfortunately that's what has been happening of late as I do need to fill the empty pockets.

So. I managed a quick sketch of a cupcake ... completely from imagination (which just goes to show what I think about during the day) as it's not easy finding the real thing in the countryside. Not surprising really, as the French have such delicious pastries of their own. And I love them, especially the lemon meringue tarts that I have a particular weakness for -- and my Patisserie in the village makes pretty much the best ones I've ever tasted. Still, there's just something about cupcakes that's, well, different, wouldn't you say ...?

Drew this in coloured pencil, in my moleskine journal. And as it really is a very quick sketch, completely from my sweetly warped imagination, I'm sure you'll be kind enough not to notice the horrendously obvious errors that I shan't mention either. I now have a cupcake craving, sigh. Cheers!

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

From LEISURE:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- William Henry Davies

I usually doodle into a small moleskine journal that sits beside me and gets picked up whenever I have to wait for something to happen, such as when I'm uploading large images to one of my stores. I've been flipping through its pages recently, and found this tree silhouette, so of course decided to see if I could take it a bit beyond its scribbly confines to and use it on cards or gifts somewhere somehow ... Here's the original sketch, warts and all:

And here are some of the steps I worked on. First I 're-painted' the background digitally so it wouldn't look so marker-pen-ish:

I then had the brilliant (debatable I know) idea of working on the tree itself:

And finally, as I have Valentine's Day ideas in mind, I carved a heart on the trunk ...

All of the above was done in Corel Painter 12 (I love it!) and Adobe Photoshop. I'm a mere beginner at both but I couldn't live without them now.

I'm still undecided as to which one to use or whether to use it at all, though I guess I could put up some cards with the carved heart on it and see if anyone would like that for Valentine's Day. Would you send it to someone you loved? Cheers.

Two foxes in love.

Honestly, I'm not too sure about this piece -- not really satisfied with the way it has turned out. But I've fiddled with it far too much now, so I'm stopping. I've branched it out into two slightly different looks, both of which I may use. What do you think, do you like either of them, or have a preference for one over the other?

There's this one with the brown outlines:

And another outlined in black:

The original sketch was done in marker pens and then worked on in both Corel Painter 12 and Photoshop.

I think I'll go ahead and place both on cards and gifts up at the stores. In my experience, the illustrations I'm most undecided about are the ones, strangely enough, that turn out the most popular, so I now put just about everything up! Fingers crossed. Cheers.

I doodled a few 'softly falling' leaves (I have leaves on my mind recently, for some odd reason!) into my small moleskine journal recently, so I scanned them into the computer - and couldn't help but experiment with the whole sketch a bit. Here are the step-by-step results:

Above is the original doodle sketch, a bit messy and very rough. Into photoshop it went for a cleanup:

Much better, no? Sat back to examine and try to figure out what I could do with it, as I'm thoroughly enjoying this whole process of creating patterns from anything and everything. As I'm also extremely indecisive when it comes to picking colours, I limited myself to a monochrome palette of blues and ended up with a couple of ideas:

They're both quite pleasing, I might create a pattern collection out of them, and include a wider selection of colours, what do you think? Cheers.

I'm lucky enough to be able to find Heirloom tomatoes grown organically, locally. I usually discover them at the regional village markets over the summer, but sometimes they even stock them at the Supermarket close by. Just one of the perks of living in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by farmland and orchards.

I'm not gloating, honest (well, perhaps just a tiny bit ...), I'm counting my blessings. Cheers.

I'm not a huge coffee drinker. It's my morning cuppa, definitely, and I always order coffee rather than tea when I'm seated at a cafe somewhere, but really, the rest of the day is spent gurgling down numerous cups of tea ... Still, I've become rather addicted to that morning wake-up jolt, and I'm lucky enough to have a friend staying who makes a mean caffeine that tastes far better than anything I could brew up -- so I've been inspired to sketch out a little typographical homage to it.

I've recorded a bit of the behind the scenes process for you. It started out as a sketch in my moleskine graph paper journal:

Then I cleaned it up in Photoshop and 'painted' it black:

And finally readjusted it and added a drop shadow and colour, though I'm still not 100% satisfied with it yet, so I may play around a bit more till I'm happy with the colour choices:

Suggestions, constructive criticism and comments, are, as always, extremely welcome! Hope you coffee addicts out there enjoy it. Cheers.

Original typography © Mariana Musa

Taken in my garden this past summer

I managed to get slightly carried away with my doodle (see previous post) ... I decided to use it in one of the exercises for my excellent e-course, The Art & Business of Surface Pattern Design ... but ended up only completing part of the exercise as I got distracted playing with the various combinations that I could create from this particular pattern. So I'll post this here now and carry on experimenting and will come up with the rest of it later.

Here's what a couple of those patterns would look like on swimsuits ...

What do you think? This is all pretty new to me so I hope you'll bear with me if things aren't quite right or I make mistakes along the way ... I'm learning to pick myself up, dust the ongoing errors off and prepare myself for more of them! Cheers.

Original art © Mariana Musa

I tend to doodle whenever I have a bit of free time (rare I know, but not highly unusual), so I have bits and pieces scribbled everywhere and I've been going through them in search of inspiration for patterns and art.

Here's one that I drew, with marker pens (or felt tip pens), in one of my little moleskines and that I'm seriously considering turning into a pattern collection ...

I do like the colours I picked for this. What do you think? A viable pattern source? I shall work on it and let you know how it goes. Cheers.

Original doodle art © Mariana Musa for Floating Lemons

Just a quick post to wish everyone a Happy Halloween! Be scary and be safe.

The Blogging Your Way e-course that I'm taking has really set all those rusty brain cogs back into some semblance of motion (can you hear the creak creak ow creak?). I'm rethinking not just the way I blog, but my life in general now. Lots of planning and exploration going on and it's all very exciting.

I've created two mood boards, one digital and one made up of some of the things I love from around the home. I see now that I'm going for subtler colours, more smoky as opposed to bright, although as you can see from the digital board, those colours still lurk around in the background, splashes of unpolished joy.

I've added a few of my illustrations, old and new, onto the digital board. There's quite a bit of fun there, and, hopefully, humour.

But I discovered, as I assembled objects for the second board, that I'm leaning more toward a pure canvas of white, with accents of colour - but softer, cleaner. And perhaps that's a better alternative for my blog redesign plans ... a clear backdrop against which my (colourful) art can display itself? What do you think?

I'm still exploring. I've barely begun, so I'm not sure yet what direction I'll be taking, but it's all quite a revelation, really. Love the way this class has made me view things from a different perspective. Let's see where this adventure takes me ... cheers.

So. I'm in the middle of updating one of my older drawings. Well, a set of drawings ... three white ducks drawn, ATC-sized (that's 2.5"x3.5" to those who have no idea of what Artist Trading Cards are) on coloured backgrounds, all in coloured pencil. The originals are at this post: Ducks ATCs.

I decided to play with them a bit in Corel Painter and now I'm not sure of which ones I should put up on my cards and gifts online - the original drawn in coloured pencil, or the new digitally re-painted ones!

I'd love some help deciding, so here is the original:

And here's the 'painted' version:

To tell the truth, this isn't the first time I find myself stuck at having to make a choice. Am not too great at decision-making anyway, and when it comes to my art I think I get far too emotionally close, so it's difficult to stand back and be objective. I can get stuck for hours just trying to pick two different shades of the same colour! It's so not amusing that it's funny.

I'm seriously considering starting up a regular "dilemma" section where I ask for help picking out colours or different versions of a piece of art or illustration ... we shall see ...

As far as my Ducks are concerned, I do think I know which one I'm leaning more towards, but am still unsure and haven't made up my mind, so I'd love and appreciate any comments and help. Which one do you prefer?