I’ve always wanted to be that person who gets to make art that goes on stuff and have often wondered, how do you even DO that?
Faced with the conundrum of having notebooks full of sketches that weren’t destined for painting on canvas, but still wanting to bring them to life somehow, I happened upon a pattern making class and learned the process of how to create patterns for surface design, along with the resources to turn my art into functional products. Eureka!
MY DESIGN PROCESS
All the elements I make begin as hand-drawn sketches. For these, I painted with highly pigmented paints which dry to a flat matte finish, for the best scanning results. I scanned them with my printer into a design app and “removed” each piece from the paper background with my iPad and pencil.
For these, I used my iPad and pencil to trace over my original sketches and then colored them digitally.
After making the individual elements, I created a tile so I could play around and arrange the elements into a pattern, and to see how it looks on a bigger scale. Then I experiment with different background colors. So much fun!
After I finalize my pattern, it’s time to lay it out on a product template and send it to be printed. BAM! My sketches get to come to life as artful, beautiful things! Yay!
