juliagrifoldesignsandpatterns

Welcome to my blog. I'm excited to be writing my very first post! I’ll start with a little introduction.

I’m a freelance designer from Valencia, on the east coast of Spain. Ever since I was a child I loved drawing, and would spend hours playing at being a designer. I remember hundreds of my fashion sketches that I stored in a shoebox, and my schoolmates telling me “if you do my drawing homework I’ll do your math!” My best marks were always in art class, and my crayon flowers design was voted the winner on a holiday school camp. From these humble beginnings I knew that I wanted to be a designer.

Which brings us to my formal art education. I graduated in illustration after spending five years studying drawing, art history, color theory, pattern-making, painting, techniques, clay modeling, draftsmanship, design software, etc. It was a wonderful time. Two of my best friends were even in the same class as me, and they are also great designers now!

After finishing these courses, I realized I didn´t want to be a comic or a tale book illustrator, as my real love was for fashion. I had also graduated in fashion design, but although I was good at fashion sketching, I didn´t like the pattern making aspect at all. Thankfully I discovered that I loved to design for children products.

It’s been a long time since I finished my studies and lots of things have happened since. I now love designing patterns, for one thing. It’s so exciting to have an idea and develop it into a repeated pattern. I’m used to designing patterns for screen, which is very restrictive - few colours tints, no textures effects, and only pantone colours. My passion for designing patterns started with creating patterns under the Disney license for a firm dedicated to school bags. I did this for years, and it gave me the technical grounding and desire to start designing my own patterns.

Googling, I discovered a great website called www.spoonflower.com. They can digitally print your design, which allows enormous freedom versus the screen-printing I was accustomed to. I’d recommend it to everyone who likes designing patterns! This is my shop, http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/juliagrifol

The funny thing is, up until about ten months ago, I didn´t use social media at all, but now I always promote my work through it, showing and selling it on websites such as society6, or spoonflowers.

It’s also great to belong to designers’ groups, and to get informed about all the latest pattern news. I hope to write about my feelings, experiences, and about other designers’ work that I admire, as well as show my own designs to you in new posts! Sorry if my English isn’t too good. I even enlisted the help of a friend to help me in order to not make a lot of mistakes in my first post. In any case, I hope you like my blog and visit me! This is a creative space for us, so I welcome your feedback.

I feel very happy as some of my designs are licensed for home products, http://kessinhouse.com/pages/julia-grifol, and as nice iphone cases, http://www.artscase.com/artist/Julia-Grifol.html