Toile de Jouy of Folk Art Rabbits

Folk Art to Toile

Remember my 20 days of drawing bunnies? Included in that 20 days were several folk art bunnies, which I revised for this Spoonflower Challenge: Toile de Jouy with a Twist. My favorite of the versions I think is the one above, but this challenge asked us for vibrant colors and to break the rules.

Toile de jouy means “cloth from Jouy,” a city in France. It is pronounced “twahl duh zhwee.” The design is often of pastoral scenes, so I revised my folk art bunnies and placed them in the garden, a tribute to the rabbits in our local park who find munching through the park and our yards a great past time. This is both a modern and traditional take on the design. For a history of this style, see Barbel Dressler’s History Repeating. See also my list of research and Pinterest board to help plan the project.

In order to get the “scenes” to connect within the diamond pattern, I traced overlapping areas of another diamond design– including parts that connect the design beyond the border of the diamond motif. I used that template to create my overall pattern design. Here’s what the traced pattern, on overlay on my design, looks like; you can see how I stayed within the outside borders of the template, but changed the inner ones to create the connected scenes.

Once the pattern was made, I started with a gallery of various colors, looking for “vibrant.” I searched for this year’s accent colors to find aubergine [eggplant] and included the suggested olive green. Although I love teal, the two color blues in the lighter version still appeals most to me.

Then, my husband brought home groceries, included boxes of tissues with new and bold colored designs. I chose the most vibrant one and created a palette. This is the result, one that breaks all the rules with multiple vibrant colors:

Oh- The Rabbits Love My Daisies- Modern Toile de Jouy in Vibrant Colors

Folk art rabbits enjoy daisies in my garden; They hide in the vibrant, neon florals —do you see them munching petal by petal? Fun for family room and DIY Kid projects.

With that title and description, I was ready to enter the challenge. Click the image to see on Spoonflower. I will be adding the traditional colored designs to a toile de jouy collection later this week.

Thanks for checking in–

So you see how the daily drawing of bunnies helped once again to inspire a surface design pattern in different colorways. This was very fun to create and play with, taking several revisions and much time to find the colors and “scenes” for this style. The template helped save much time; if you’d like the Procreate template, just drop a comment or email me. Write hello@sheri42.org for different colors and scale. I think I’m going to make a pastel one for my great granddaughter’s sheets. Wouldn’t that be fun?