I create patterns and illustrations for textiles, home decor surfaces, paper goods, and really any surface that needs a design on it. My art tends to have a story behind it's initial inspiration, rather than following trends, and I'm a huge fan of storybooks and children's literature. I think it comes through in some of my playful and colorful illustrations that align with the expansive imagination of a child. ​
Hey there
I'm Caroline Maria, the artist here at Caroline Maria Design.
​
I'm a native New Yorker who grew up on Long Island and spent many, many hours of my younger life at the beach and up in the Adirondack mountain region of northern New York.
I now reside in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina.
I adore Golden Books and children's literature, like The Wind In the Willows, which is my favorite.
Maybe most of my artistic ability and love for color, structure of patterns, and color coordination, comes from my family - my Grandpa from Italy was a tailor, and my mom was an expert dressmaker, seamstress, and quilter, who attended a Needle Trades school for her high school years. She made all her own clothes as a young woman and she was dressed beautifully! There was a lot of colorful fabric in our home. And dear ole dad was a draftsman (before there was CAD) who loved the precision of all-caps lettering and measurements of blueprint drawings.​
I'm an admirer of old-world tradition and unapologetically love the way the world used to be when I was a child - and further back then that too! I'm not too interested in progress but more in keeping and incorporating worthwhile and beautiful traditions into the current era.
My short story.
I've been creating digital art since the first consumer Apple computers came on the market.
I started out in graphic design and got jobs doing that at newspapers, print houses, and ad agencies.
​
After doing freelance graphic design while raising
a family (with husband of 27 years!) and homeschooling our two sons, I rejoined the workforce doing admin, non-art type of work. But slowly as the children got older and eventually left home (sniff, sniff) I found my way back to art. But no more graphic design - I had moved on from making predictable shapes, using formulas to make logos, and worst of all, typing copy for the endless brochures I designed.
​
I wanted instead to make things like this happy hand-drawn illustration. Made on an iPad with Adobe Fresco, a favorite iPad app of mine.
All my work progressed
from first using this:
great choice!
All you could make were basic shapes, lines, text with maybe ten font choices, and a bunch of swatches that consisted of black and greys with some very simple patterns in the colors of - you guessed it, black and greys.
Est.1984
It was the mouse that made all the difference. Prior to the Mac,all computers were DOS and there was only a monitor and a keyboard. What kind of fun could that generate? None!
Anyway, so the digital art journey began with that diminutive Apple computer. But first,
I taught myself graphic design.
I just had to find a reason to use that little invention with the cute Apple logo on it.
Fast forward a lot of years ....
Then I taught myself digital illustration and pattern design.
The learning curve was greatly reduced due to a few initial things: Skillshare, Mel Armstrong, Cat Coq, Liz Kohler Brown, Laura Coyle, and Amy Bradley.
​
Many thanks to those artists and their Skillshare classes - you've helped a lot of people discover their healthy obsession! (Mom said, "Make sure you always say thank you").
That's it! The rest of the story is what you see on this website.
Thanks for reading this far!
I first came in contact with that little wonder of computing in 1984, the year the first consumer Apple computer came out. (Please don't do the math - yeah, I'm not in my 30's to say the least!)
My older brother bought one. We were at his studio apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. He had it sitting on his kitchen table and he, myself, and a few of his friends stood around it and wondered what the heck to do with it! Were we supposed to touch that little device which was attached to computer, that was the right size to fit under a hand?
caroline's imac
A pattern from the
Fairyland Blossoms collection.
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
The most certain way to succeed
is to try, just one more time"
- Thomas Edison
A favorite quote!
A little something else:
Exhibit A is some of my non-brand artwork.
(I just had to give these pieces a page
of their own, considering the amount
of time it took to make them)
If you’d like to get in touch about licensing, sales, collaboration and project ideas, please reach out at carolinemariadesign@icloud.com