Featured Designer: Lidija Paradinovic Nagulov

1 - singing forest (yellow) - celandine design 7 - neo ethnic - celandine design celandine design

Feast your eyes on these stunning patterns by Lidija Paradinovi? Nagulov, who draws under the name of Celandine. Lidija is in love with patterns and surface design and her passion is contagious! She writes, “there is nothing in life I would rather do for a living than this.” Lidija explains how she came to the world of surface design in this short bio:

“A finance and administration manager by day and a designer by night, she started to draw almost by accident – a friend asked her to make a custom signature to use on a gaming forum. What started out as a casual pastime has over time turned into a hobby, then a passion, and is now slowly becoming an alternative career. Her inspiration is mostly drawn from nature, and she loves to draw small creatures like birds, insects, shrimp or crabs.

Starting out in illustration and moving over to patterns, she is drawn to complexity and strives to make ever more elaborate and intricate repeats. She spends more time picking out the color combinations for her patterns than she does drawing them, and every design ends up having ten to twenty colorways at least.

Lidija started to draw in 2009, at the age of 31, and has been making up for lost time ever since by staying up far past any reasonable bedtime and scribbling away. Her second love in art is digital painting, and she is currently completing a series of illustrations for a book of children’s stories written by six year olds, which is set to be published at the beginning of 2014 in Croatia.

Lidija lives in Belgrade, Serbia with her husband and two year old son Luka. Luka loves when his mom draws for him, but his requests so far are confined to ‘heart’ and ‘hippo’. Lidija’s dream is to become successful enough in the textile design industry to be able to make a full career switch and finally free up her nights for sleeping.”

You can see more of her work on her portfolio site, purchase items featuring her artwork on her Society 6 page, or say “hi” on Facebook. If you are interested in learning more about how she makes her patterns, you can also check out her pattern tutorial video on YouTube. Here’s to a creative weekend! -Chelsea

  1. Your work in amazing, it has a beautiful flow to it. I would love to achieve this style of design, I wasn’t sure how it was done so thank you for sharing your work, I going to get game and try it myself. I have a tablet that Im going to take out of the bag for this work. x

  2. Lidija, your work is stunning! What tablet do you use for creating your work? I enjoyed watching your tutorial on Youtube, you did a wonderful job. I might give it a go and try out this style. AMAZING :). I am your new fan, too :).

  3. I was mesmerized by this video. I will have to review it at least 50 times to learn all these steps. I wish you had a pdf to go with it so I could memorize it word for word. I have struggled to learn repeats. Slowly getting there, as I am also learning photoshop and illustrator. I am way better than I was last year, but want to improve even more. Thank you again for sharing. It really resonates with me.

  4. lydija, what a great story. and what a great designer you are. I recognize being busy with the perfect color match and all the colorways. hahah and the nightimes too 🙂 i really hope for you that all your plans will become real time 🙂

  5. wow i so much enjoyed your video. you owned your self a very smart way of working through the process. the color overlay is one i will gone use more often now i have seen how you work with it :-)) thanks for sharing, very much appreciated :-))
    and wow what a wonderful style you have in your artwork :-))

  6. Wonderful, lovely designs!! Gorgeous colorways, exquisite drawings, highly personal themes – you are soooo talented! Do you work with home furnishings and children’s wear manufacturers? If not, you should, I’m sure they’re waiting for you 🙂

  7. Oh my gosh, thanks everyone for the wonderful comments 🙂 Sorry it took me so long to realize there is actually a comment section under here 🙂

    I’m particularly happy that some of you found the tutorial helpful, I loved making it and I will happily make more, so if you have some topics you’d like me to cover go ahead and ask!! I want to do one on my color selection process, not really a tutorial but just describing how I do it, since I obsess over it so much and it might be interesting to someone out there.

    Magda I use a Cintiq but honestly I have no idea what the model is. One of the cheaper ones 🙂 It’s my baby though, I love him.

    Marie, I’m really just starting out so I’m not working with much of anybody 🙂 But I really hope that will change in the coming few years. This is definitely not an industry one can enter overnight, but hopefully I’ve got what it takes 🙂 My weird little dream is to design wallpapers. We’ll see if that happens someday too.

    Thanks everyone once again!!! 🙂

  8. oh one more thing I wanted to say about the video – I think for anyone struggling with repeats this way of doing them might be a little easier than the regular methods, because in a sense you’re not really working out any alignments or distances – you’re just growing your pattern kind of organically. It seems like it should be harder but it’s not 🙂

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