What can I make patterns from? Messing about with old drawings.
It’s a mid-week weekly today, because an unprecedented spell of good weather over the Easter weekend got me out of the studio. I caught up on laundry and gardening each day, as well working outdoors in my sketchbook collecting new ideas for pattern-making (I have written about the whole process on The Weekly over at Binky McKee).
I have been doing a lot of pattern-making recently. It has always been a hobby, but since I began setting up a store on Redbubble for my work as Binky I discovered that, as far as my work goes, patterns work best on their products. It has been a steep learning curve because I had to not only learn my way around the platform, but I also had to teach myself how to make patterns properly and be clean and professional. I still don’t have enough of a store to tell everyone about it because I am still finding my way; for example, some designs which I really liked didn’t sit well in that context.
Last Wednesday I raked through my archives and got out hand-drawn patterns I have made in the past and assembled them digitally into simple repeating patterns. I made 25 altogether, working fast. The idea was to experiment on Redbubble to see what works and what doesn’t. Most of them looked dull on the products as they are quiet and small and looked grey all over, but the one that really did work was the one on the top right, which looked great on everything, much to my surprise. I learnt a lot about design from this exercise, but quite apart from that it was interesting to see how these drawings looked as patterns. I particularly like the top left one, although it didn’t work on any products, but the idea of making a pattern this way is interesting and one I hadn’t thought of before.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
I have been doing a lot of pattern-making recently. It has always been a hobby, but since I began setting up a store on Redbubble for my work as Binky I discovered that, as far as my work goes, patterns work best on their products. It has been a steep learning curve because I had to not only learn my way around the platform, but I also had to teach myself how to make patterns properly and be clean and professional. I still don’t have enough of a store to tell everyone about it because I am still finding my way; for example, some designs which I really liked didn’t sit well in that context.
Last Wednesday I raked through my archives and got out hand-drawn patterns I have made in the past and assembled them digitally into simple repeating patterns. I made 25 altogether, working fast. The idea was to experiment on Redbubble to see what works and what doesn’t. Most of them looked dull on the products as they are quiet and small and looked grey all over, but the one that really did work was the one on the top right, which looked great on everything, much to my surprise. I learnt a lot about design from this exercise, but quite apart from that it was interesting to see how these drawings looked as patterns. I particularly like the top left one, although it didn’t work on any products, but the idea of making a pattern this way is interesting and one I hadn’t thought of before.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
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