I am currently doing an online graphic design course and hope that the skills I learn will be beneficial for my new business. I have created a few mailers for marketing purposes on Photoshop and am interested to see how these compare with mailers that I will be creating after the course. The course runs for 10 weeks and teaches you to use Adobe Illustrator. Here are two flyers I made using Photoshop:

Sprout landscapes launch social media 050515

The yellow colour is really awful... so these definitely need to be worked on! In the course we have been introduced to some contemporary designers who are currently leaders in their field.

One of the fmous Graphic Designer we learnt about is Marian Bantjes who makes very beautiful, sensual, detailed work. You can watched her TED talk below which is very inspirational.

[embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/marian_bantjes_intricate_beauty_by_design?language=en#t-25427[/embed]

"Sorrow" by Marian Bantjes was made from real flowers that were donated by a local flower shop for an installation at the Chicago Design Museum. She named the artwork Sorrow because the fresh flowers wilted and dried up over time while they were on display. (see http://bantjes.com/work/sorrow/)

I really like the way she used real leaves and flowers as materials to design with. So for my first assignment I also used this technique. The brief was to write your name using different tools in Adobe Illustrator and also make use of a raster image. The aim was for you to experiment and learn how how to the program. I took photos of leaves from my garden and incorporated them into the design. This is what my assignment looked like:

Once I am finished with the course I hope to see a big improvement in the kind of marketing material I will be producing for Sprout Landscapes.

One of my favourite places to visit when I am in the Cape is the beautiful winefarm near Paarl called Babylonstoren. Anyone who loves gardens and plants will be in their element exploring this formal vegetable garden- there is so much to discover! With its wide variety of herbs, vegetables, roses, fruit trees, indigenous plants and areas of interest all beautifully co-ordinated; combined with an incredible attention to detail makes this garden worth revisiting each season.

When I visited now in May was very different to the last time I was here in September last year: instead of the fruit trees having blossoms they are now heavy laden with citrus - naartjies, oranges, lemons, guavas. You can smell the citrus in the air and the sound of flowing water follows you everywhere.

A lot of the fruit trees are deciduous and have lost their leaves which gives the garden a naked beauty that makes you aware of the changing seasons and the effect of time.

The display in the "Puff Adder" (a snakelike tunnel made out of timber slats) is on the Spurflower plant or Plectranthus spp. with some beautiful plants on display. This is an indigenous plant group that belongs to the family Lamiaceae. Plectranthus is indigenous to South Africa and often grows in shady areas. On a previous visit they had a Clivia exhibition. But the exhibition is no longer necessary because they have planted a massive bed of Clivias running all along the pathway under the trees - the River and Clivia Walk.

I love all the timber trellises and obelisks that they have created - it really gives the garden a lot of character and compliments the main wooden structure of the walkways.

You probably can't see them in this photo because they are so small but there were Swee Waxbills here that I enjoyed watching. The whole garden was actually filled with birds and birdsong.

Even though it was an overcast day we had such fun exploring this garden. I will definitely keep going back.