A few weeks ago I was telling you about the inspiration for our upcoming fall collection, and how I had been inspired by a little owl on a bottle of beer. Once I have a starting point for my inspiration, I start making a mood board, pulling together images and sketches, color palettes, even words or phrases that help me to clarify where I’m going with a collection. Sometimes it has a clear and obvious effect, where you can plainly see the inspiration in the final collection. Other times (like this one), it’s a winding road from point A to point B, and there might just be a glimmer of the starting point.
The little beer owl had such a beautiful, rustic quality that it made me think of Russian and Scandinavian wood-block prints in books that my dad had when I was a kid. He studied Folklore and Russian, and we always had these great books of folk tales and Russian literature with magical-looking scenes carved into block prints. Anyway, the owl had that going on, and so I started thinking about folktales and fairy stories, and sketching up images of geese with golden eggs, sly foxes and unicorns. It started to look something like this:
It was a far cry from the darling beer owl, but you can kind of see where I was going with it, right? The problem is, once I get going I just have to follow that lead. The rest of the designs diverted even farther from my inspiration board after this point, and it didn’t feel like a cohesive group anymore. It was time to rethink. I’ll show you the outcome in Part Three soon!