Creating for Spoonflower's Design Challenges help keep the creative juices flowing...

This design was created for the September Design Challenge. In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, the month’s theme was “dreamers” which could include celestial and sky imagery and/or future aspirations.

I was inspired to create some cute celestial explorers reaching for the stars! I may have also been slightly inspired by magically delicious lucky charms and the cuteness of puffed, stale marshmallows...lol 

This design challenge is also hosted in collaboration with Headbands of Hope which are given to children with cancer in hospitals across the US because, as Jess Ekstrom, founder of Headbands of Hope believes, fashion can be a great vehicle for positive self-identity.

You can visit Headbands for Hope here: https://www.headbandsofhope.com/

BEHIND THE SCENES: Concept Design

Of course, I do like sharing the behind the scenes things too....so here are some of the concept sketches that my niece helped me with before this all came together digitally...

CHARACHTER DESIGN

And then spending some time creating the features of all the items, but especially the adorable astronaut I like to call Puffy, in a new open source design program I heard about at Ai-Con, called Krita.

CHOOSING COLOURS

Then time to add colour from a colour pallet I pulled from a sweet Hubble telescope galaxy shot plus my niece's abstract crayon art and there we had the beginning of the colours for the final design!

While my design didn't make it into the top 100 chosen for voting on in this challenge, there are many amazing designs that did, and you can vote for your top 10 on Spoonflower here.  One lucky one will make it into Headband for Hopes product line as well!

And of course, if you have a project that needs an element of cute astronauts and their ship in space, this Cute Astronauts Among the Stars design will be available next week (view it in my Designs "not for sale" section for right now) in my Spoonflower Shop as fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap paper.

BONUS! Learn more about all the neat DIY projects you can do with the Spoonflower custom print products!