Welcome back to the Chaise Lounge. This Friday, Nick invites Sarah Von Dreele into the lounge. Von Dreele is a graphic designer by training who wanted to try her hand at fine arts before choosing a different path that has taken her all the way back around to painting.
Discovering design (graphic)
Von Dreele got her degree in graphic design at Rhode Island School of Design and started her career by working alongside mentors at school in a student capacity before graduating and then being employed by some of those same people which gave her the chance to help launch an early web company.
Even more launching
In 2003, she started her own branding consultancy firm called onethread that uses a focus on design to help companies improve their face using design.
Painting again
Three years ago, Von Dreele started painting again to exercise some of her personal creative impulses. After six months of her painting, enough of her friends told her she should “do something” with her art that she decided to take it to SURTEX, a trade show where artists can sell their work not to consumers but license it to businesses who can pay in royalties. She sold contracts for 50 of her pieces, but she also noticed that her style would look really good on walls. So she started turning paintings into wallpaper.
Von Dreele paints whatever it is she wants to paint, then the paintings are photographed or scanned into a high definition image file that is manipulated so it can be printed out and tessellated to make a perfect wallpaper pattern. And the wallpaper is printed to order, so there’s a chance to customize each design before it’s sold.
Von Dreele’s ultimate dream is to create full-time, so to see everyhthing she’d pursuing, visit her personal site SarahVonDreele.com and her Instagram @sarahvondreele.
"All of the paintings are done ink wash, which is water-based, but unlike a watercolor can be more opaque or also very translucent. I really like the range of tonality and light values that you can achieve with it.”
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Wrap Up
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