Wallpaper Wednesday: Seven, Eight, Lay Them Straight

Happy new year!

I hope the first few days of 2021 have treated you well - or at least marginally better than the train wreck that was 2020. How was your new year’s eve? Ours was spent quietly at home, doing nothing much. I think I was reading in bed when the clock struck midnight, and everyone else in the house was fast asleep. We went on a short staycation in the city over the new year’s weekend, but apart from that, it’s been pretty much like any other day in this pandemic-stricken world of ours.

This time last year, I’d dived into a 30-day pattern challenge, with all the gusto and optimism a (normal) new year typically brings. No such resolutions or challenges this year. It isn’t that I’ve lost all hope, or that I’m walking around shrouded in a dark melancholic veil of doom and gloom (although there are those moments...); I’m just being realistic about the amount of time I will have this year. With the pandemic (still) wreaking havoc over our daily lives, who knows what the year will be like. We’ll just have to take it one day at at time. 

So enough with being sombre... let’s add some colour to our lives! Since it’s a new year and all, it’s a good time to refresh our device wallpapers and screensavers, don’t you think?

This month’s wallpaper freebie is one of my favourite patterns from last year’s 30-Day Challenge - SevenEightLayThemStraight. What I like most about it is the colour palette. The muted blues work well with the pastel grey, yellows and peach, and it just makes me feel... calm. I also like how the lines are wonky and uneven but neatly arranged - perhaps a metaphor for this new year? If 2020 was the year that upended our lives and left all its pieces in a jumbled heap on the floor, perhaps this year we’ll be able to pick everything up, little by little, and slowly arrange it in a way that makes sense to us. 

We can only hope. 

Oh, and I’ve added a little bonus this year - a monthly calendar! The desktop and laptop wallpapers now come in two versions: with or without the current month calendar. Hope you like it!

As always, these wallpapers are for private use only.

Enjoy!

-A-

Wallpaper Wednesday: Exhale

Can you believe it’s already December?!? Time flies when we’re battling a pandemic, huh?

It’s been a rough and crazy year for each and every one of us, no matter our situation in life. Lockdown, semi-lockdown, working from home, not being able to work at all, homeschooling, travel restrictions, not meeting our loved ones as often as we’d like, little to zero social life... the pandemic has affected us in one way or another; nobody’s immune. 

So sometimes we need to remind ourselves to breathe in...

... and exhale. 

When the world outside is so ugly, sometimes it helps to have something pretty to look at. And since a lot of us are now increasingly tethered to our devices, maybe changing up our wallpapers and screensavers would be a nice distraction. It won’t kill the virus, solve our water woes, or save us from global warming, but if it brings a tiny bit of happiness when your screen lights up, why not?

I designed this pattern way back in January, when we were still on a new year celebration high, and the ink was still wet on that list of 2020 resolutions. Our lives were still normal and hadn’t been upended and scattered all over the place like beads on a marble floor. Do you still remember what life was like back then? 

Sigh. 

Exhale was part of my 30-Day Challenge, where I tried (and succeeded, yay!) to design one pattern a day for the month of January. I designed the tile in Procreate, then vectorised it and brought it over to Adobe Illustrator so I could make a pattern and scale it up without any issues. (I didn’t think ahead when I made this and the Procreate canvas I used wasn’t big enough, otherwise it would’ve been possible to create the pattern in Procreate itself or with Photoshop. But hey, you learn from your mistakes 😄). 

I haven’t done any tiled patterns since then. I remember having a lot of fun doing it, so maybe I should create more. Adds an item to laundry list of things to do in 2021.

Alrighty then, enough of me blabbering; time for you to download your December freebie* and brighten up your devices. Links are below, as usual.

Enjoy!

-A-

*For personal use only.