Contest Entry: Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits Tea Towel

Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits Tea Towel

Family Recipes | Results Announced October 12

Family traditions are especially present during the holidays as everyone gathers in merriment and celebration around the dinner table. For this week’s challenge, share a family recipe that is a yearly staple. Whether it’s Grandma’s famous casserole or the wiggly fruit jelly salad that mysteriously makes an appearance, we want to see what recipe completes your holiday traditions! Entries will be submitted at the Linen Cotton Canvas fat quarter size (27″ x 18”) but previewed during voting as a Spoonflower Special Edition Tea Towel (16″ x 24″). Submissions close October 3, 2017 at 3 p.m. eastern daylight time. Voting begins October 5, 2017.

The first thing that came to mind when I heard this week's theme was my family's chocolate gravy and biscuits. We don't actually have the recipe written down anywhere, so I had to ask my mom to write it down for me! We usually just use the store bought cans to make the biscuits that go with this gravy.

For the tea towel, I just started with drawing a basic piece of paper with a folded corner, and I layered the blue lines and written parts over a watercolor pencil background. In the final design I discarded the watercolor look for a cleaner digital color.

I then decided to do the border on a separate paper and finish combining them on the computer. I did a loose drawing in pencil and went over those lines in a larger brush pen and a fine liner pen for the details. It was at this point that I decided that I would rather not have the watercolor so I didn't color in this layer.

So I took photographs of the two sketches. In my original sketch the top flowers were a lot closer to the bottom elements than they are in the finished design. They had to be separated to fill the towel better, and the portions of the design that fell off the edge of the paper had to be digitally added. I also had to fix the messy leaf at the top and the squashed rose on the right.

I colored everything in with a sort of pastel primary scheme, and added a small border around where the roostery towel would end. Then I added a layer of linen texture to push the foreground elements forwards a bit. The finished design was rotated to fit the linen cotton canvas fat quarter that the design is going to print on at Spoonflower.