1. First I gather inspiration from my daily walks with my dog, Moon, sometimes I take home flowers and leaves I’ve picked up, sometimes I will take pictures. Pinterest is a great source for research, especially if you can’t visit the thing you want in person, like if I were to make a penguin pattern, I’ll look up some penguin photos.
2. Even before I have a real pattern in mind I will dive into my painting process and paint as many little elements related to the theme I want to paint about.
3. Then I scan in my watercolor elements and clean them up on my laptop.
4. I import my scans into adobe illustrator and image trace (vectorize) them. This means that they are turning from raster based to vector based. The benefit of this process is that your patterns will be infinitely scalable without losing quality or becoming pixelated which can happen with raster based elements.
5. I group my elements and start the recoloring process.
6. Next it’s time for building motifs. So let’s say I have petals, leaves, and stems, I will then take all of those and build them into more elements like complete flowers to give more variety in my patterns.
7. Finally it’s pattern time! I play a lot with this step and usually make three or four patterns with one set of painting elements before settling on one or a couple.
8. The last step is deciding what to do with my patterns and mocking them up! This may include selling them in bundles on websites like etsy or creative market, selling them on POD sites like society 6 or spoon flower, saving them for larger collections to get licensed, or using them for personal projects, website designs, home decor etc.

Share your work with me on Instagram! Tag me @sandralynneide and hashtag #sandraeidetutorials so everyone can see what you have created!