You can call her Judy if you want to. In fact, she’s actually pretty pleased to be told that “Judy Black” sounds like it could be the name of a female assassin in a ’70s blaxploitation flick. “A lot of people that know me out there think that I’m Judy,” she says. “They don’t even know my real name.”

Her real name is Jennifer Neill—not to spoil the mystique or anything—and she’s the designing-screenprinting force behind the Toronto graphic-textile company called, that’s right, Judy Black. Neill, along with her electric-Kool-Aid-cool Judy Black designs, will hit the One of a Kind Show and Sale at the Vancouver Convention Centre from Thursday to Sunday (October 8 to 11). She’s been “madly” making stock for the craft-tacular event since summer.

“I always wanted an exotic aka,” she says over the phone from her home studio in teeny-town Ballantrae, north of Toronto. “My sisters and I always have nicknames for each other, so they’ve always called me Judy.” (Sister Valerie, who co-owns Judy Black, is, Neill readily admits, the business brains.) “And ”˜Black’ is kind of a juxtaposition because I rarely print with black.” Considering she is cuckoo for colour, this is an understatement.

Even when she was screenprinting “miles” of fabric at the Ontario College of Art & Design, she always swooned for “super-colours”. “It’s convenient that they’re in again, but they never go out of style for me. Colour is so important,” she says. “I mean, there’s a whole colour-therapy industry.”

If three-year-old Judy Black is Neill’s “colour-therapy industry”, her couch treatment means Day-Glo–chic canvas pillows that are as liable to get a party started as a conversation. You could say the designer is a wee bit allergic to any beige-on-beige décor. “My major m.o. is let’s have fun.” She adds, laughing, “Like, let’s lighten up, people.” Even her pillows’ flip sides proclaim a super-encouraging “YES”.

She wasn’t kidding when she named one nature-tripping pillow—where birds fly across an otherworldly forest and a gigantic sun—Acid Sunset. (Pillows are around $90.) The birdies bravely traverse radioactive pinks, nuclear greens, searing blues, and scorching reds. Neill thinks about the world outside, colour-drenching images to emphasize our animal planet. “There’s so many problems with the birds,” she says, “so many little species dying off.” She shot some back-yard flora to print beguiling Leaves pillows. She was intrigued by the little holes in the leaves. “Some little creature was there and had a meal.”

Circles, hot-pink pirate skulls, and “Mom” also make Judy Black’s Technicolor world—which, incidentally, includes clothing and totes—go round. “I’m semi-obsessed with circles,” Neill says. That means pop-arty orbs on Flo Circles, a pillow that could turn a white room retro-futuristic fabulous—like Andy Warhol tossed with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moodily poetic I Heart Mom looks uncannily like the Joan Baez, Vol. 2 album cover. “That’s my mom. My dad took that photograph in the early ’70s. She says not everyone wants someone’s mom on a pillow, but I say, ”˜Everyone has a mom. That’s why we’re all here!’ ”

For One of a Kind, Neill has been a screenprinting crazy woman. She exposes screens in her darkroom, often made from “hundreds of doodles”—“No computer, just my little magic hands”—then spends hours layering environmentally friendly water-based ink on fabric. Lately, all three sisters trace, cut, and sew. “Sometimes it’s a three-woman sweatshop.”

Despite everybody’s sweatiness, she’s bringing to Vancouver new jumbo Serene Scene pillows and silk boudoir cushions in black, white, and red, printed with “old French prostitute ads—kind of swanky”.

There are also shades of grey: Neill’s excited about starting a new line of duvets and bed sets—but sometimes this artist who turns the natural world shocking pink and fluorescent green imagines returning to school to become, yes, a botanist.

“It’s just such a fantastical world growing and living right in front of us,” she says. “We should scrub our eyes clean and reconnect!”