My friend Lindsay recently started a new pattern project along with illustrator Llew Mejia called 101 Florals. (You can see tons of awesome patterns in her previous Daily Pattern Project.) I was instantly hooked on 101 Florals, so when I saw that they were having guest illustrators join them each week, I immediately volunteered to be one of them.
There was already a 6 week waiting list when I signed up, but my how time flies! I knew my pattern was due for today, but with my schedule, I didn’t have a chance to start working on it til yesterday.
This week’s theme is cosmos flowers, so I started by sketching a bunch of cosmos leaves, buds and blossoms.
I scanned in my sketches and began to layout the pattern.
I haven’t made a repeat pattern in a while, and I forgot how tricky it can be. Composition is really important. Not only do you have to make a nice arrangement of elements within your art board, you also have to think about how the pattern will look when it repeats, so that it will still have balance and that no element or section will stand out too much.
With a tight deadline, I finished up the first pattern and sent it off to Llew as my submission.
I like this pattern, but when I started out, I had something else in mind, so I kept working. I created a repeat pattern using my leaf sketches, and then arranged cosmos flowers on top of that pattern in another repeat.
I liked it so much I sent these over to Llew in the wee small hours of the morning to see if he could use this more complex pattern instead. And he could! So this is the pattern you can see over on the 101 Florals blog.
One of my issues with the first pattern I created was the background color. Don’t get me wrong, I do like it, but I had this sneaking suspicion that it could be better. It’s been on my mind all day, and suddenly I envisioned a dark purple-blue. I tried it out, and I love it!
The new background color adds that “pizazz” I was looking for. I even decided to change my long-standing geometric patterned twitter background to this floral one!
Every time I make patterns I think about the fact that I should make more patterns. I had a great time making these cosmos inspired repeats, and I’m so happy to be part of Llew and Lindsay’s ongoing project. Make sure to check out the other cosmos patterns on 101 Florals: Llew’s “Cosmic Cosmos Flowers” and Lindsay’s “Cosmos, Inked.”