Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Anna Maria Horner

Anna Maria Horner, me, and Carrie Jarvis, owner of The Top Stitch. Last Friday, I had the very special opportunity to meet and hear from Anna Maria Horner. She is a lovely person, an artist, and a fabric designer. A few things I have made with her fabrics:
Listening to Anna Maria talk about her career path was encouraging for me. She still does pretty much everything herself. She does not have the staff I imagined. She does have one full time assistant. So now when I dream of being more productive, I can envision starting with just one person. Makes the dream much closer. She does the computer part of her design work on Gimp. (I am so glad someone asked her the question.) I have been reluctant to spend the money on Photoshop, but now I have a free alternative with Gimp. I have only just started playing with it, but it seems a lot like photoshop. If it is powerful enough for Anna Maria Horner, I know it can do everything I need too. It was such a treat to meet one of my design heros. Her upcoming book is going to be amazing. Here is Anna Maria's blog.

2 comments:

Megan Petersen said...

Her designs are quite glorious! It's hard to imagine any kind of illustrative design being created in either GIMP or Photoshop. Illustrater would be my go-to programs for that kind thing, but I guess we all have our preference.

I love what you have created with the fabrics too. Your designs really showcase them well, without letting the designs overshadow the product itself. ♥

StudioCherie said...

Thanks for the comment Megan. AnnaMaria Horner actually paints her designs and uses gimp for scaling them and creating repeats. I think it must have a lot in common with both photoshop and illustrator - I have only scratched the surface of what the program can do. I guess I referred to photoshop in my post since what I do is mostly edit photos and not create fabrics. Anna Maria Horner has a Fine Art degree and the talent to go with it as you can see by her artwork. I realize now that I am a pretty lousy writer. She doen't create her designs in Gimp - she creates them by hand. She manipulates them in Gimp. Thank you Megan!