I’m working on my next collection, the third in my annual series in the “Spring Migration” theme. It will come out in April, but I’ve finished the drawings and am producing the stencils for the designs—in advance of spending two weeks of March in Nepal and Bhutan!
As people often ask how I do the designs, here are a few pictures illustrating the early steps in the process of moving from idea to digital drawings towards cutting stencils.
This is another collection where I'm trying to create a whole scene spread out across the three rows of four chocolates. That means I have to figure out how to position images on each of 12 chocolates that will ultimately all work together.
In the picture below, each square in the grid represents a chocolate in the box. When drawing birds or animals, I often work from photographs like the ones I've inserted here.
On an iPad, I draw the image for each chocolate separately. But since they are all drawn individually, I have to put all the drawings back together to see how it looks. The red lines around the images below indicate the approximate dimensions of each chocolate. It shows where I need to make adjustments -- in this case, realigning branches so they work from one chocolate to another.
I'll often fiddle around with a rough impression of what a background might look like as well, as you can see below. But, this is all just pixels on a screen. Colored cocoa butter will look different!
Then it gets a little less interesting. I separate each image into multiple digital layers, one for each color. Those get imported into software I use for cutting sheets of stencils.
Below, you can see on the left a file of 70 identical images of some branches, just one of four stencils for this one chocolate out of the scene. Some chocolates use up to seven stencils. Ultimately, each color of cocoa butter will be sprayed through a stencil onto sheets of mylar, creating the final image for each chocolate. Later on, those transfer sheets will be used to put the colored cocoa butter designs on each individual piece of chocolate.
And here's an image of just one cut stencil. Can you figure out which square it is for?
Well, that's where the process stands at the moment. The preorder announcement for this collection will come out later in March, so be on the lookout.