Before getting there...
Everything is possible, you can do whatever you want, no restrictions whatsoever. Sometimes it's difficult to deal with all that freedom, usually limitation helps the creative process. At least it gets more focused, instead of going in all directions. I'm limited by color and that's about it. And now when we do a lot of color, instead of only black and white, it's more fun. But then I sit there with all blank papers and all pencils and all color tubes and think”where the f*ck should I start? For the first time in ten years it will happen, the inspiration is gone, there will be no prints, we just buy something from a print company or we just copy someone else!”.
But no way. I start in a little corner. Trust the gut feeling in the end, because somewhere in there I know there will be prints, and they will be nice. The handmade part is super important for me. I love it in other brands and I would never take it away in my own. It makes things unique and personal. I don't want to sit and cut and paste vector flowers in Illustrator, too easy, too plain, too anonymous. Sometimes people say it's hard to see the 5preview DNA in our allover prints, for example florals. Then I tell them to look closer. The lines are hand drawn, the ink spots are there. The mistakes. The flaws.
So today I have been sitting all day working in Photoshop with high res scanned images of gouache drawings I did last week ( with a terrible flu!). It takes a lot of patience, the computer is ready to explode, files are so heavy and I'm working on 50 layers. But now, at 3 o'clock, I'm there! Showing Josephine and she seems both surprised and happy, and immediately we start to place it on the garments in the collection and that feeling is amazing, when everything is falling in it's place. And you know there will be another collection, and maybe the best one ever.
//Emeli
#prints #colours #5preview #inspiration