I found the inspiration for the story while on a walk in my neighborhood, but it seems I had already dreamed it up.
After completing the Mushroom Forager & Forest Floor collection, I started putting together content to share on my socials. I was flipping back through an old sketchbook and landed on a page I'd painted over a year ago. An abstract drawing of a mushroom personified, a self-portrait. I remember painting it. I don't remember it meaning anything at the time. It was just an image that wanted to exist.
I believe I was working on a composition study, testing that same cap-as-hood idea from different angles, literally. That's normally where an idea starts for me, a dozen small, quick tries before I know which one is worth finishing.
I opened my files for the new collection, and there it was again. Not the exact sketches, but the exact palette and the exact shape. That same plum-and-gold combination and mushroom motif. I hadn't gone back to that old painting once while working on this. I didn't need to. Some part of my brain had already decided what this collection looked like a year before I sat down to make it.
The forager girl herself is new, a woodland character built just for this collection. But she showed up in the same palette anyway: deep plum and ochre against Inkwood and Bone, with umber and pale sage as the two accent colors that are just for this collection. Nothing else in the shop will use that exact combination, which is the point. Each season gets its own small world.
Everything in this collection is digital, but I drew it to look like paper cutouts, torn edges and all, so it feels handmade even though it never touched a craft table. That's become my whole visual language at this point.
New pieces are dropping through the fall, and the mushroom cottage print is up first.