11.20.16 9:15pm

Last post of the evening - I decided to see if all three of these patterns could hang as a collection.

Moon Jelly - image 1 - student project

Moon Jelly - image 2 - student project

Moon Jelly - image 3 - student project

And I also wanted to check them against my mood board again...what do you think?

Moon Jelly - image 4 - student project

11.20.16 7:55pm

I'm tired and can't figure out the math to create a half drop in Illustrator so I just did it using the pattern maker tool. I think that the half drop works much better with the flow...

Moon Jelly - image 5 - student project

11.20.16 7:30pm

Here is a screenshot of the corrected pattern:

Moon Jelly - image 6 - student project

11.20.16 Evening

After experimenting a bit with my color palette this afternoon I went back to the jellyfish to simply and refine the drawing and add more details.

Moon Jelly - image 7 - student project

I then rebuilt the motif also simplifying the foliage and eliminating one of the pieces.

Moon Jelly - image 8 - student project

From there I recreated the basic pattern repeat being careful to make sure I had the right pieces overlapping. I'm pretty happy with the way this tuned out and the added contrast takes it up a notch. I'm still unsure it's just right yet. The foliage is more prominent than the jellyfish. I may play around with that later.

First though I'd like to try and figure out how to turn this into a half drop repeat.

(Looking back over this I found a couple of errors that I need to correct - one of the leaves is in front of one of the jellyfish legs and the top jelly fish legs are not in front!)

11.20.16

Tried my hand at another warmup pattern pulled from a detail of the larger pattern. Could be a possible coordinate. Meet number 32 in my 100 Patterns Project:

Moon Jelly - image 9 - student project

I also wanted to explore the colors again before I revisit the jellyfish. Elizabeth is right I need a palette that's going to give me more of a contrast. I reassigned the colors in my color palette like this:

Moon Jelly - image 10 - student project

And then recolored the pattern:

Moon Jelly - image 11 - student project

I'm going to see how the addition of these new colors can provide some needed contrast to my jellyfish pattern.

11.16.16 (evening)

I have tried painting this pattern and while I'm not going to rule it out in the future it is too time consuming for this particular project. I played around with colorizing in both Illustrator and photoshop and decided to go with illustrator. Keeping a limited number of colors might be useful if I actually do want to take it into the textile market and I can more easily control the colors in Illustrator. (These colors however are just place holder colors until I finalize a pallette!)

So here is where I am this evening (I still consider this a rough):

Moon Jelly - image 12 - student project

11.16.16

Here is my progress thus far. It's an intermediate step I'm about 6 hours into this particular pattern. This still isn't the pattern that I'm seeing in my head but I feel like I finally have a break through that's moving me in the right direction. I'll try and parse it out:

I Loved this jellyfish from my sketches:

Moon Jelly - image 13 - student project

To get the look of the more complex pattern that I'm envisioning I knew that I needed to overlap my motifs. I delved into all of my pattern and textile books scouring them for a repeat that had the depth that I wanted and also had a structure that I thought would complement movement of this jellyfish.

I came across this sketch in my William Morris book. It is pretty simple for Morris, it has the same motion/flow as my jellyfish and roughly the same shape, too!

Moon Jelly - image 14 - student project

I rummaged through my sketches and found some foliage that looked like it would be a fit:

Moon Jelly - image 15 - student project

I took both of these sketches into photoshop and collaged them together into one large motif:

Moon Jelly - image 16 - student project

Which I then turned into a repeating pattern block:

Moon Jelly - image 17 - student project

Here's a mockup of what this second pattern will look like:

Moon Jelly - image 18 - student project

I'm pretty excited about this one. I'm not sure if I'll be doing it digitally or with gouache. Let me know what you think...

11.15.16

I have several pages worth of drawings and sketches for this theme - I'm wondering if maybe there is enough for a collection! I haven't put together a collection thus far - just a couple of coordinating prints, nothing more.

I decided to do a warm up pattern based on one page of sketches that have simpler shapes - they were drawn and inspired from microscopic sea life. Here is the sketchbook page:

Moon Jelly - image 19 - student project

And the icons that I drew from the sketches...

Moon Jelly - image 20 - student project

Here is my pattern block for this simple warm up pattern:

Moon Jelly - image 21 - student project

I like it and had great fun making it, but it's not the more complex pattern that I'm seeing in my head. It does give me an idea however about how all of these little creatures can fit together in a pattern. I hope to digitize another page or two of my sketches today. I'm thinking thought that I may spread all of these sketches out on the table and have a go at trying to draw what I'm seeing in my head. I want there to be a large variety in scale and I also want to layer components so they look like they are growing together. I also will probably be exploring a more sophisticated color palette but these are part of my instinctive color palette.

I posted this pattern on my Instagram and also on my 100 Patterns project page on my website.

Moon Jelly - image 22 - student project

11.14.16

I created this mood board the first time I went through Elizabeth's courses (see the date??!!). I chickened out of working on it because my vision seemed much larger than my skill set. I have been continuously making patterns - I have a 100 Pattern Project that I'm working on - but they have been relatively simple patterns.

When I received Elizabeth's email about this workshop I immediately signed up because I wanted to take another stab at this particular mood board and work on some ideas for a much more involved pattern and repeat.

Moon Jelly - image 23 - student project

Amber Benton

Life is colorful!

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