I used to be so nervous about copyrights. Everything is copyrighted! I mean come on, you can't even sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant without having to pay someone a $700 royalty fee. (Yikes, flashbacks of me as a waitress singing - I DONT KNOW BUT IVE BEEN TOLD - SOMEONE HERE IS GETTING OLD! yep, those awful yet joyfully embarrassing songs are due to dang copyrights.)

"Inspiration" and "stealing ideas" might be used interchangeably. Unless, you tap into the incredible non-copyrighted world which includes: Everything God created (make that floral pattern from YOUR photos of YOUR flowers! there's an idea!) , public domain such as (most) photos from .gov website or creative commons and anything SO OLD that well, no one is coming to sue you. How old? Read more from the government himself.

So! I took the following photos for free ancient "inspiration". You can see that swirls, hearts, and beautiful patterns are not a new thing. This does not mean use other people photography of ancient things - you gotta go take the photos. I also don't mean replicate this stuff and claim it as your work. This is solely inspiration and can be used as such.

Random photos from my traveling days. I'm sure you can find some inspiring patterns closer to home.

Disclaimer: It's been a while since I took copyrighting and perhaps some information has changed or will change. Either way, I am not a lawyer just a designer aka right-brained aka not a lawyer!!! Please do some more research if you have more questions or send me a comment :)

Now I also took some photos of some medieval looking tiles at a park in Spain. From there I created a medieval color palette using an eyedropper tool (Don't have a program such as Photoshop or Illustrator? Try freeware such as ColorZilla or Gimp to figure out colors!). Then I created some medieval cookies for the sole purpose of well, because it was a creative outlet and my hubby loves sugar cookies. Anyways, here are the results:

This looks complicated, but not really. Mix Royal Icing and add blue, green food coloring. To make gold, add about 10 drops of yellow to every one drop of blue and one drop of red. Pipe using parchment/wilton cone or if you're cheap like me, a plast… — This looks complicated, but not really. Mix Royal Icing and add blue, green food coloring. To make gold, add about 10 drops of yellow to every one drop of blue and one drop of red. Pipe using parchment/wilton cone or if you're cheap like me, a plastic baggy and snip off the corner to create thin lines. When photographing, position cookies so you don't see any major mistakes :)

I learned how to create thin lines on cookies from Julia M. Usher. She is awesome!

Brenda Fleming | New Mexico Art