The illustrations of Thierry Cattant have this classic 50’s touch. He regularly draws for the french magazine “Voici“, among other things. Don’t forget to check out his section moleskine, it’s pretty cool.

Sempre Livre Teen from Birdo Studio on Vimeo.

Birdo is a studio of character design animation and graphic motion from  Sao Paulo,Brasil

I’m excited to share with you my first interview. I discovered Ink & Spindle ,a screen-printing studio,few months ago while wandering in the blog of Lara Cameron, Kirin note, one of the three co-owners of this new company, which just turned 1 year. Ink and Spindle is run by 3 designers from Melbourne (Australia) Lara Cameron, Bianca van Meeuwen and Tegan Rose. The patterns of their fabrics are delightful & whimsical. In two word Just Fab.

What does a textile designer actually do?
Here at Ink & Spindle we only spend a small fraction of our time designing, which mostly involves drawing and then finishing in Illustrator or sometimes draw directly in Illustrator. The exciting part of being a textile designer at Ink & Spindle is actually getting to print the design as well and see it ‘come to life’.

What is your background?
We all come from a somewhat unconventional background. Tegan studied fine arts and then teaching, Lara comes from a multimedia and webdesign background and I studied International Business & Management.

How long have you been in the textile industry and how did you start?
Ink and Spindle was born about a year ago and that’s when we all really started to focus on the textile industry. Before Ink & Spindle Lara & Bianca designed patterns and outsourced the printing for about 3 years.

How would you define your style?
Lara’s style could be defined as cute and whimsical, Tegan’s style is more classic and my style is often described as ‘European’.

What’s are your influence?
Our main influence is Melbourne and Australia, but that said, inspiration comes from all different sources.

How do you get inspire? How do you feed your creativity?
Creativity is not something you can switch on or off, it’s an ongoing process. We try to step away from the business every so often to get inspired by our city and surrounds.

Have you been stuck creatively? What’s your remedy to get past it?
We’ve all been stuck creatively and the best thing for us is to actually step away from the business and seek inspiration by going on a trip or a stroll through the city. We are also inspired by the art and designs around us.

How do you work? (the process)
Our designs usually start on paper and are then scanned into Illustrator where we design in a repeat pattern format. Once the Illustrator file is completed we get it printed on a big piece of film, which in turn gets exposed onto a screen. Once the screen is ready, we print the pattern repeat on fabric.

Mac or pc? Software used:
Lara & Tegan use a pc, Bianca uses a mac. We all use Adobe Creative suite.

Favourite material to draw:
Moleskine & artline or straight into Illustrator.

Your favourite place to work:
The Ink & Spindle Studio or a local cafe.

What are your current projects?
We have lots of projects on the go, mainly pattern design, printing and preparing for next year’s craft shows.

Your favourite artists:
Lotta Jansdotter, Catherine Campbell, Wendy June, Publisher Textiles, Cloth and many more.

What can you say about Ink and Spindle?
Ink & Spindle is a boutique screen-printing studio. We specialise in high quality textile printing for designers and independent labels.

And finally, If you had one tip to give for those who want to work in this industry, what would it be?
Our best advice to give is to ‘do it’! Be proactive and promote yourself or start your own business.

Please not only visit the Ink & Spindle site but also Bianca’s blog and Lara’s blog

The blog will launch a new category: interview. I will interview designers and illustrators, that I love. I hope you’ll find them interesting and inspiring. The first one will be on the 24th/11. Please stay tuned!

The weekend is almost over, I hope you enjoyed yours, I went to the countryside : in the region of el Valle del Nalon) we visit, the church of Santa María de Tanes ,which is from the 16th century and right in front of the Dam, it’s just beautiful, romantic and perfect to celebrate an unforgettable wedding. If you can visit it, do so. In any case, here some pictures

the view from the church:

Isn’t it inspiring or what? I feel like drawing nice brides…hope you are enjoying the week

Fashion French international illustrator Marguerite Sauvage works for Longchamp (France) Non no (Japanese magazine),Glamour,l’Oreal, Mattel… She’s a A class illustrator with a very special feminine and elegant touch.  Visit also her old blog

This magazine is well know from most of the designers but in the merely case that you never heard about it, let me introduce you to the Smashing magazine. This magazine is a great ressource for graphic & web designers. It provides interesting news and useful info, and publishes regurlarly a top of high quality design freebies such as freefont, wordpress theme,icon sets and so on (free but under license rules, obviously!). If you don’t know yet that site, I highly recommended to you as it will surely become a valuable tool for your work.

This week my favorite shop is in papernstitch. It’s a shop of paper goods. The stationery is very cute and all of them have a little Swarovski crystals that adorn them. And I found the idea
she’s got a shop in etsy too, but I found out this later…

paper good: pretty Smitten papernstitch shopher blog etsy shop

Nowadays, it seems that is all about being famous, red carpet,being constantly under the spolight, although it’s not something that attract me I must admit that I ENJOY drawing it.

For this illustration I was inspired by the tv serie Sex in the city, Carrie got soooooo many shoes…, I bet my place wouldn’t be big big enough to hold them all.