Sneaky Peeky...

Well, I'm FINALLY working on some new collections! Took me a while to gather my scattered thoughts and to simply sit myself down, tether myself to my desk with my trusty earphones, and create. I actually put together some simple mood boards, with my rough sketches, doodles, colors that I'm thinking about, and photographs of the look and feel of what I want to accomplish. Geesh, I've really come a long way in this department. Imagine me, I'm planning something, hehe! But honestly, designing a repeating pattern has a lot of elements and nuances to it, if you don't plan it out a bit from the start, it gets overwhelming! And the trick is....to make yours completely different than anything else that's out there! Whew. No easy task, folks.

I completely believe that with a pattern like this, the layout is key! If it doesn't look good and balanced when even in thumbnail size, I'm going to keep working on it until it does. Second of course, is the colorway and the style of how to color (fill, no fill, outline, thicker outline...etc.), do I create custom fills, patterned backgrounds...the list is endless. I usually concentrate on my main pattern first. Once I get that "right" in my head, the companion patterns follow and flow effortlessly.

I did these cute little motifs about a month ago in my "little black book" of doodles. The black folky florals are the ones that I've just digitally drawn, and the lighter layer below is from my sketchbook (I use this as a reference to trace on). Yesterday and today I drew them in Adobe Illustrator in the proper layers so I can add color properly to them later on. When I was finished, I was pretty astonished that the patterns resembled so closely those from my Ukrainian Pysanky eggs, made MORE than a few years ago when my vision was a bit more perky.  I keep these little eggs in a bowl in the living room. It's really funny how certain things stick in your memory. I can't remember people's names that well, but if I've seen a pattern somewhere?? It's stuck in my head!!! :D

These are made from goose eggs, each one took me 5-6 hours average. The process is similar in theory to batik, each line/stroke is painted on with hot wax, from a wax pen, also called a "kistka". The eggs (hollowed out and cleaned) are dipped in a series of dye baths in progressive colors. Wax is applied after each color to basically seal in that color. At the end, the wax is taken off with a candle flame, and et voila, THE REVEAL. Each little one is kind of like a surprise, you never know what you'll get.

The Process of Designing...and Figuring Out How to Use Adobe Illustrator..

I still don't know how I actually come up with ideas for patterns, but I sure know that I love doing it.  Some days designing just "happens" a lot easier than other days, maybe someday I'll figure out the internal switch that controls it all!  I tend to work in creative spurts, and while taking the e-course "The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design", that certainly was the case.  I literally cranked out so many ideas in the first 1 1/2 weeks to last me a few months of fiddling around and developing them.

I doodled these little florals below.  Music is a really important catalyst in my designing process, and I find that I concentrate best when listening to classical music.  Is it the "Mozart Effect"??  No idea!  But I know that it makes me sit still and really get lost in what I'm doing.

I was really intrigued that I came up with these little floral/Dr. Seuss-y funny shapes, around the center flower.  The idea for those came from a lampwork/Venetian style glass necklace that I had been playing with earlier.

(necklace designed by Jasmine Keane)

I redrew the motifs in Adobe Illustrator, which I have really become comfortable using over the past few months.  After arranging them on a page, I initially had issues figuring out how to add color to them.

Black and white? No problem!

I reversed out the page. White outline with dark background? No problem!

Multi-Colored outlines with background color? No problem!

Okay, cool...I've managed to get the motifs with an outline color and solid fill.......but??? I had trouble actually coloring the individual sections.  That's because I really didn't know what I was doing in Adobe Illustrator, you have to think completely different when using it.  You really have to have an idea of what you want your end result to look like, more or less.  I was already familiar with using layers, and after reading some of the tutorials, I finally did it, after a lot of talking to myself.  I do that lately ;)

Et voila!

After finalizing the main pattern, I designed the two matching border pieces....

And......meet Boho Carnival.

I arranged them all on a page with the colorway that I used.  Fun stuff, no?  A tremendous, wonderful learning process, no doubt about it.  I am really fortunate that I can figure out how to use software fairly easily.  It's almost like two different processes. 1.  Doodling, getting the ideas out on paper (yes, the BEST way is just to sketch the old fashioned way, paper and pen!!) 2. Reconstructing those sketches/idea digitally, so that they convey your original vision.  And....oh yeah, making them "repeat", so when tiled there is a seamless pattern is quite the task as well.

I learned tons about using Adobe Illustrator through tutorials on Lynda.com. They charge a monthly fee, but you have access to learning virtually ANY software lessons, they seem to have them all. Check them out!

Oh, and if you want to Pinterest any of my artwork or photography, please attach a link to this blog and give me credit. If you don't, I will find you and hurt you ;)