Recently

Pattern love {Ikea}

Some inspiring patterns snapped on a recent trip to Ikea.

Real weddings {Sally and Paul}

Bloom wedding invitations on textured white cardstock for Sally and Paul's wedding last month. 

Colour inspiration {palette No.21}

Pattern love {moodboard}

As part of my new journey into the world surface pattern I'm going to be sharing my love of patterns here on my blog, and for this first post I'd like to show the pattern love moodboard I created for my surface pattern ecourse. I spent quite some time putting this together, pinning tons of images over on Pinterest then selecting only the patterns I'm drawn to to help discover my own style.

From sketches to finished pattern

We've just come to the end of the first module of the art and business of surface pattern design ecourse and I'm already looking forward to starting module 2 in November. Module 1 was all about finding inspiration, mark making, creating motifs, understanding pattern design, homing in on our own style, colour choices plus loads more. I've loved every minute of this course and have met (virtually) so many lovely inspiring people from all over the world. One of the things I've enjoyed most is turning my own sketches into patterns so I thought I'd share a few pictures showing the stages from scanning my original drawings through to a completed pattern.

Scanned motifs from my sketchbook.

This is a physical box repeat tile I created by printing my motifs in varying scale and doing lots of measurements to ensure the correct positions to work as a repeating pattern.

Which I later scanned to check it worked... and to my astonishment it did!  I discovered playing around with cut out motifs and re-positioning them is a great way to come up with new pattern combinations.

A couple more weeks into my course we started looking at colour and various ways to come up with new  colour palettes. I chose a colour combination of navy blue, mustard and greys for my motifs, and digitally coloured them.

After playing around with positioning and scale here's my finished placement pattern.