ILLUSTRATION BY MERCEDES ARMSTRONG
The other day, Mercedes Armstrong pulled out an art project she did at Columbia College Chicago. The piece—acrylic and gouache on plywood, painted in fluorescent blue, pink, and turquoise—is tribal but psychedelic. “This was my start,” she announces. Fascinated by the designs she was learning about and energized by the rainbow palette of the ’60s, she began playing with repeats, creating surface patterns that could be applied to different products, like wallpaper or gift wrap. Her dream job is designing prints, like this one, for kids’ clothes: The palette animatestraditional pink and blue, and the jagged lines and odd shapes add a little swing.
If Mercedes Armstrong had a past life, it was either in the Art Nouveau 1910s or the rainbow pop 1960s; she sees the same flowy, imaginative forms in both. “It’s fantasy, a little bit,” she explains, “not so serious.” Her studio’s dotted with marbled paper, floral typography, soft watercolor studies of dragonfruit, a fabric print of happy watercolor-clear lemons, a Greetabl box done in her Lash print, black, peach, and royal blue on white. Her favorite colors are now salmon and vermilion, richer and subtler than the Midcentury rainbow. But her sense of play is even stronger.
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Where do you get your ideas? I’ll search keywords online, look at Anthropologie’s beauty product packaging, page through books of old textile designs. [She flips through one to show me a toile of feathers.] Sometimes, I’ll think, “Man, how did they ever do that back then? Entirely by hand?”
How do you work? Everything starts with the drawing. I get right into it. Pigma pens and Tombow markers. I like the boldness, and with the different nibs, I can control the line flow. I work with different media—watercolor, gouache, acrylic—depending on what the design is going to be used for.
Do you always paint first? Not at all. There are times I want an artist’s hand, but other times, I’ll just scan the drawing into the computer, open it up in Photoshop or Illustrator, and compose my pattern there, tracing my own line work and focusing on layout and structure to create a repeat. You can manipulate your image, change it into something completely different. I try not to take it too seriously.
You’re doing surface patterns, so you don’t want to sink into a quagmire? Yeah, I don’t want to overthink it. You don’t have to make the flowers literal representations. Make it fun, change it up. Whenever I hear someone say, “Oh, I can’t draw,” I always encourage them. I think people want to draw with photorealism, and honestly, I don’t even think that’s that interesting sometimes. I’d rather see something done with imagination.
How do you come up with your palettes? I don’t look at the color wheel! I just follow my gut. A lot of my stuff is really bright and fun and whimsical. The Color Collective blog will pull colors from photos and create palettes below; that’s really helpful, because you can see the combination in three dimensions. For Lash, though, I was just playing around with markers.
Do you ever get stuck? Sure. But I try to just draw it out, just keep going, even if I hate it. Usually later I’ll come back and think, “Oh, I was onto something there.” Music helps, too—it changes the energy. Sunni Colón, Toro y Moi—I even like Earth Wind & Fire. You can lose yourself. That’s the best time, when you’re so deep into your work and enjoying what you’re making and present in it, and time passes, and you don’t even notice. I try to chase that feeling. Lately I’ve been starting and stopping a lot. I need to take my own advice and just draw through it!
