Hello everyone, we are delighted to be guest blogging and partnering with Mel Smith Designs to bring you an insightful series of blogs focusing on all things creative!
We are Decorque, a family-run business based in the UK, designing, producing and selling unique products for the home & stationery markets. We thought we would share with you one of our biggest influences, florals, and show how they affect our design themes and collections.
Our design team consists of Lesley Stevens, with background and experience as a surface pattern designer specializing in the fashion and textiles sector; and Harriet Stevens a qualified graphic designer. Between us we adore digital design, photography, fine art, sketching, screen-printing and surface pattern design (to mention a few!) – and as you can see from our mood board this creates a diverse and eclectic mix of inspirations to aid the design of our products.
An enormous influence for us is Louis Comfort Tiffany whose Art Nouveau stained glass windows and lamps create beautiful floral cascades in rich, opulent colours that bring a glow to any room. We also love Gustav Klimt’s floral paintings, which have a wonderful delicacy and intricacy. With Lesley’s background, we are always inspired by watercolour and gouache paintings. Gorgeous soft painted florals like that of Luli Sanchez and the more vivid controlled roses by Working Girl Designs remind us of our tropical flowers painted and layered onto our Skin Tropique A4 art print.
In juxtaposition we love bold, digital, layered florals that mix transparencies, effects and combine hand drawn sketches and illustrations next to CAD drawn flowers and photographic images. The mixed-media effect is one we try to experiment with in our work, such as the Hot Skin Tropique Mouse Pad which uses bright colours mixed with monochrome sketched skin print & illustrator drawn stylised florals.
As mentioned, digital florals are a huge inspiration for us, and a trend that has cascaded across all areas of design from interiors, to fashion and stationery. Matthew Williamson is the king of the digital fashion print, alongside that we have stumbled upon some fabulous designers on Society6 like Laura Sturdy and Aimee St Hill who are taking florals onto all types of media.
We are currently designing our SS13 collection, and focusing on selling both online and offline in the run up to Christmas. We have such a variety of products, all featuring our gorgeous designs. Cards & tags, mouse pads, art prints and our infamous and totally unique decorative and stylish cork coasters and placemats. If you haven’t seen these yet, take a trip to our website and see our best selling Charm of Hummingbird placemats, and Red Butterfly coasters, perfect for any table!
We also have our successful blog featuring wonderful designers and creatives, alongside posts on all creative subjects. To keep more up to date with all things Decorque you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, and of course check out our main website.
Links:
Main site link: www.decorque.com
Blog site link: htt
Twitter link: @decorque
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/Decorque
Pinterest link: http://pinterest.com/decorque/
Moodboard image references/links:
Floral plate by Anthropologie
Floral card by Laura Sturdy – Society6
Watercolour floral by Luli Sanchez
Flora painting by Nick Wright
