Fall and Halloween

I love Autumn. It arrives mid to late September and the world become a blaze of fall colors. The air is crisp, sweaters are pulled out of storage, and everybody spends their weekends taking drives out to pumpkin farms and apple orchards. It’s a magical time of the year. And the gateway to one of my favorite holidays, Halloween.

 I’ve been designing retail programs focusing on the autumn season for several decades now. When I was Creative Director at Suzy’s Zoo, I made sure to provide incredible autumn and Halloween style guides to our licensors for their product development. I had a great time creating the style guides and working with the illustration team in developing style and character art. The style guides were extremely successful, and they adorned multiple product mixes annually for five autumn seasons.

 At Carta Bella I have had the opportunity to create multiple collections based on autumn fun and Halloween. My first ever collection was Trick-or-Treat, a retro-Halloween collection inspired by the art of Norman Rockwell and Dick and Jane. It was a huge hit and netted me a permanent position as a contributing artist at Carta Bella.

My second, and my favorite, Halloween collection was inspired by my memories of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, Saturday morning cartons like Scooby Doo, and old Universal horror movies. I chose an alternate Halloween color palette, relying heavy on purple to create the style. It became a huge success and allowed me to continue creating annual collections ever since. Several of these collections were licensed to Riley Blake Fabrics to be turned into fabric collections.