I recently did some black and white ink drawings of edible and poisonous plants for a friend making a wilderness survival book. I took inspiration from some of those line drawings and free-handed a good variety of flowers and plants while looking at my own drawings for reference.

I did all the watercolor artwork on one sheet, but the sheet was larger than my scanner bed so it came in on three scans. The last one was a watercolor I had done previously on its own smaller sheet of paper.

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 1 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 2 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 3 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 4 - student project

And after watching Bonnie's tips for creating calendars in Illustrator, I created the 2017 calendar. Thanks, Bonnie! That was very helpful in speeding up the process. I live traced my motifs in 16 colors and kept them pretty close to the colors I had painted them in. So my color inspiration was choosing bright colors of paint and doing very little mixing. I used 4 colors when I painted so the live trace in 16 colors was able to maintain the integrity of my painting quite well, I felt.

I toyed with the idea of adding the watercolor and ink drawing above to the watercolor-only motifs since they look quite different, but I like the way they mix in the overall pattern. I also decided to arrange all of my elements into a rainbow gradient on the back side of my calendar. I'm happy with how it turned out.

Thank you again for your wonderful classes, Bonnie!

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 5 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 6 - student project

UPDATE: I decided to also go back and do the original class project. I made a repeating pattern with some of the same watercolor elements I used for the calendar. I did the pattern in two color ways, but the second one I had a hard time deciding on the background color. I've included three final artboards:

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 7 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 8 - student project

Watercolor Calendar Challenge + Repeating Patterns (Updated) - image 9 - student project

^ I think this one has a line in it because I did "Export for Screens" instead of the "Save for Web" with checking "art optimized". The line isn't really there in my pattern.

Jamie Lewis

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