Graphic Conservatory

Somewhat by chance, I went to the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco for photo inspiration. Here's a selection of the many photos that I snapped on my iPhone:
My style inspiration board:
From there I sketched in my notebook while looking at the images for reference:
Using a mix of the blob tool and live trace, I converted the images to vector shapes:
I used red when I needed to separate blob-tool-created shapes, but I am digging the stark palette that showed up!
I played with more complex palettes with 10–15 colors, but kept finding myself refining to less and less. Here is my original large palette:
And my small 5 color palette:
Here are the photographs I used to make motifs with the live trace tool:
And the resulting motifs in color:
My first patterns! Just practicing making patterns repeat:
My grouped motifs:
This was tricky for me—Bonnie makes grouping her elements look so easy!
My first 'complex' pattern:
Used the 'Recolor Artwork' tool to make some variations:
I'm addicted! Swapping the colors was really fun. I even brought in my original full palette of colors while recoloring and really like some of the stuff that turned up.
I tried Bonnie's second method of making repeating patterns by making a 'bouquet' though mine is more like a scattering of elements.