Today I rewarded myself for all of the hard technical and graphic design work that I've been doing lately with just a little bit of play. I wanted to do a quick pattern without having to do very much drawing and I wanted to work with some of the techniques I have learned in Bonnie Christine's Skillshare classes.

My patterns still don't have the flow that I would really like them to have. The only way to get there is to make pattern after pattern. In fact my current goal is to make one hundred patterns! I am well on my way and in the upcoming days I'll be doing a blog post for each one and creating a special page to collect them in.

So what kind of pattern could I make without drawing? When I was at the UNCC garden back in December I picked up some beautiful oak leaves and brought them home to scan. I had seen several artists use scans of real objects in some greeting card artwork and I thought I might give that a try.

I brought the scans into illustrator and used them as a guide to practice drawing shapes with the blob brush. I quickly had some nice organic shapes to play with. Just as I did with Firethorn I made this pattern using the pattern maker tool in Illustrator. I did everything all in one color - I find that I can focus more on the flow of the pattern if I'm not distracted by color.

When I had the pattern working then I began to play around with color. I decided to emulate Victoria Johnson and treat pink as a neutral. I love the yellow browns against the pink. I put the muted purple or mauve color into the blog header because I'm trying to find my way with color. I am striving for a bit of surprise with color - something that might make you look twice....not quite jarring but just a bit unpredictable.

Thanks so much for your encouragement through Instagram and FaceBook. I am so very happy with this new SquareSpace website. I feel like it's a simple and clean aesthetic and I can just focus on my art.

I wonder how many patterns I can make this week?