"Paisley"

I love paisley. Paisley is pretty flowers organized in a rational, mathematical, 2-dimensional garden. I like paisley on ties, boxer shorts, carpets, curtains, or anything in a gypsy fortune teller's shop. It's lush and sensual, familiar and exotic. I smell jasmine and hear Aladdin rubbing his lamp at the cave entrance.

I did the drawings above in colored pencil and silver marker. They are each 20" x 24", matted and framed, and are available if someone is interested in purchasing them. I did them because I enjoyed creating paisley at work so much, I came home and made these for fun.

My experience in packaging includes printing paisley patterns around unusual box shapes, and such intricate patterns can be challenging to meet on the overlapping edges, but the results can be striking. Mixing and matching patterns and colors is also a challenge, but well worth it if you have the time to beat these things into submission. The patterns shown below were used by Barton's for a set of gift boxes. If you'd like to see more of my packaging, go to my website at http://www.artbyhensley.com/.

"Linked"

Patterns are links of images, and people are linked in patterns too. This is in my mind because after much prodding by a friend, I put a profile on LinkedIn.com. This lets us post resumes, link to sites, and contact people from the past.

Contacting old friends was emotional for me. I had let them wander out of my life when they scattered to different parts of the world, or changed priorities, or any of the other reasons we let people fade away from our daily lives. I still missed them from time to time, but I had gotten kind of ashamed of myself for letting so much time go by, or frustrated when Google searches turned up empty. LinkedIn suddenly made people accessible again.

It’s been fun to reminisce with old pals about drinking parties and stupid adolescent behaviors since we survived, but we’ve also grown up somewhere along the line. Some of my college friends have children in college now, and I seldom have two glasses of wine. It’s hard to imagine so much time has passed, and we can commiserate with each other about the struggles we’ve had to endure in order to earn livings with our talents.

Maybe this all sounds dull to someone still in college and looking forward to starting their career? Yawn. Old people talking again. Yeah, yeah, but maybe you can learn something they don’t teach you in school? Contacts matter. Friends matter. They matter in ways you just don’t imagine when you’re scraping yourself off the floor after a keg party or when you wake up next to someone you really didn’t intend to sleep with. The fact that someone might remember your youthful indiscretions after 30 years matters because you never know when or how some of these people will turn up in your life again, and if those people really mattered to you at one time, maybe they will matter to you again.

I’ve needed time to contemplate all of this, and spent some time doing a mental exercise of taking one doodle, and figuring out how many patterns I could make with it. Making patterns was a meditation, though I’ll probably use these patterns as backgrounds in future projects. I also use this kind of thing in packaging.

We are all linked in one way or another. Everyone participating in Illustration Friday is linked, and the links made here are linked to the links we have other places, and sometimes we find out that we are linked to each other in multiple ways. It reminds me of a discussion I had with little kids about infinity. The number of connections is mind boggling.

All of these patterns are made in PhotoShop, all from the same 5 lines. It’s simply a matter of linking the same piece together in different ways. I made 30 patterns before deciding to just stop. It starts getting into the infinite possibilities, and I just can’t deal with infinity any better than 8-year-olds.

In the end, the important thing is to treasure the links we have with people who matter to us.