Cardinal Snowscape

SURFACE DESIGN

Cardinal Snowscape is reminiscent of seeing red cardinals in the snowy dead of winter. In Northeast Ohio, we see cardinals in January. Like the robins, they don’t all fly south for the winter, at least not any more. Part of the inspiration was also a watercolor painting I did a few years ago, shown directly below this text.

With this collection, we have several illustrations available. In one, we have two cardinals perched on a tree limb with a snow squall starting and shadowy trees in the distance. We also have a winter scene with that dark blue-gray winter sky and some late day sun filtering through the cloud cover. Cardinals are landing on a bare bush with a long cast shadow. In the immediate foreground is a galvanized mailbox adorned with pine cones and branches, and a sassy bird perched on top. This illustration is also broken out into a spot illustration with the entire foreground scene sans background, a spot with just the bush and cardinals, and a spot with the adorned mailbox and single red bird.

The patterns include a Toile de Jouy style repeat with the bush and mailbox, and other branches with cardinals. There are two snowy cardinal-and-pine tossed patterns, a pine weave with birds and snow, tiles with birds and pine as 1-way, 2-way and 4-way versions; a plaid with and without cardinals and snow, noisy textures and several colors with snow, as well as some open tiles and wintry blue textures in different values. Please note the 2-way and 4-way are shown at a much smaller scale to show how the tiles repeat, which doesn’t really show up when viewing little more than the original 9-tile repeat layout.

Though they appear smaller here, the Toile de Jouy and pine weave repeats are 12×12 inches, just for an example. Many of my repeats are 12×12 inches or larger, especially the ones created in Photoshop.