I N S P I R A T I O N

I started off this project with a walk through Japantown in San Francisco with my partner. We passed through a lovely little townhome community with a beautiful flower garden. Despite making my partner photograph a dozen different exotic flowers for me, I settled on these common Bellium wildflowers as my inspiration.

 

S K E T C H E S

I'll admit, I was really struggling to find the creative energy to work on this initially but I decided to push through by taking it easy and drawing loop-de-loop flowers instead of rendering something more detailed. For my dot pattern, I referenced the very center of the Bellium flowers. I used an 8H graphite pencil, a fine point black Sharpie marker, and a Canson mixed-media sketchbook.

 

V E C T O R    A S S E T S

I Photoshopped and then vectorized my page of illustrations before grouping them by types (leaf, flower, dots, etc.) so I had a nice library of shapes to work with. At this point I only had a a vague idea of how I would layer my pattern. The leaves would be the background, the flower petals as the mid ground and the center of the flowers as the foreground.

 

P A T T E R N

I started off by arranging the flower petals on the mid-layer, then adding the center of the flowers on top in the foreground. For the background I arranged the leaves, and to make it less busy, I filled in the outlined leaves with the blob brush and made them similiar in hue to the color background. After testing my repeat and making a few improvements, I added in the square dots as a way to fill in some of the gaps.

 

C O L O R    W A Y S

I imagined this design as a throw pillow and wanted to color it as both a funky pop of color, and as a more subdued piece of decor.

Color Way 1 - Moss:

I referenced the colors from my initial photograph for this color way. I started off with a dark, rich green as the color background. As I moved to the foreground I warmed up my hues and went with lighter tints to build depth.

Color Way 2 - Linen:

For my Linen color way I used this interior design photo from Sherwin Williams. I liked the neutral beiges and sampled colors from the flowers, the painting, and the vases.

 

M O C K U P S

I loved this project! Creating layered patterns certainly has it's challenges. Happy to have acquired this new skill. Thank you!