Meet Maxine! In the early oughts she worked on our team at Longina Phillips Designs, producing prints for the collection and graphics for various projects. Now she's a children's book illustrator and we thought you might like to see her beautiful work.

Read Maxine's story in her own words, below.

Book illustration was something I always wanted to do but...

I knew it was not the most profitable of career choices. So I put my dream on the back burner for many years so I could afford to travel overseas and buy a house.

The passing of two close friends prompted me to finally take the leap.

After losing my friends I felt like life was too short to not do what I love so I went about making my children's book illustrating dreams a reality.

My favorite part of illustrating is when...

I am painting up the final illustrations for a book.

My process involves...

When illustrating children’s books I mainly use watercolor, colored pencil, and aquarelle crayons. For my...

I'm a freelance surface pattern designer based in Brisbane.

Before, I was in clinical research and my background is biology. I primarily work in home interiors, designing wallpaper, soft furnishings and cushions. 

I don't think homewares were a conscious choice.  

I developed a style over the years and it seemed to naturally fit more for home textiles than it did for fashion or greeting cards. I remember trying my hand at lettering and I was just terrible! It took a few years of doing different courses and trying things out [to] hone my style and it naturally fit into interiors. I have a general interest in interiors too, so it probably went hand in hand.

It all started seven years ago...

I was an Australian expat in the US after I had my first child. It's a little cliche, but when you're on maternity leave you have time to reassess what will work with your new lifestyle. I came across surface pattern design and I thought, “Of course, it makes sense.” For...

Words by Lyndsay, Creative Lead and Senior Designer

Are you a surface print pattern designer? Want to make money selling your prints one day? Unless your goal is to work as a designer inside an established studio, you'll need some sales skills. Yep, not only do you need to know how to design impactful, impressive, and on-trend designs, but you'll have to convince a customer to buy your design (and not someone else's!).

So what does it take? Well, we'll tell you! We're Longina Phillips Designs and we've learned a thing or two about selling prints over 30 years of being in business. Read on for our top sales secrets and turn your creative mind into money now!

1. Curate an enviable collection with broad appeal.

If you want to create a commercially viable, diverse, and desirable selection of work, you'll need to offer a broad array of styles. Customers have different needs and so the more looks you can supply, the greater your chance of having the right print at the right time. ...

Words by Lyndsay, Creative Lead and Senior Designer.

Struggling to create at a commercially viable pace? You’re not alone. Keeping productivity high in the fast-paced world of fabric design is a daily challenge, even for those of us who have been in the game for years. 

But, while we Longina Phillips Designs designers can sometimes find it hard to fly through a brief, we have one important ace up our sleeve: Adobe Photoshop training. Or, more specifically, certain skills that help us complete a job much faster than when following textbook (aka. more longwinded) processes.  

Fellow designer Steph and I recently sat down with our lovely social media coordinator, Morgan to chat about pace and productivity and the Adobe Photoshop training that has helped speed our work the most.

Morgan: When you first started in the fashion industry, did you find the expectations to finish designs quickly quite shocking?

Lyndsay: For sure. I remember being at university...