I recently took part in the Make it in Design Summer School 2019, which is a pattern design challenge with briefs that are based on upcoming trends – one of the briefs I completed was ‘citrus grove’.
This is a little story of how I created my final design ‘Pink Lemonade’.
The first thing I did was create a digital moodboard using Pinterest – for this design brief I was really drawn to cool pastels and lemon motifs. The words that jumped out at me were ‘summer, fun, bright’.
I spent a few days working on my moodboard, and would spend a bit of time looking at it thinking about the images and colours I wanted to use when I finally got a chance to start painting!
I don’t get much free time to paint and draw so I find it is really useful to have a clear plan ready for when I can sit down with all my art materials 🙂
So the next step is the one I enjoy the most, doing the painting and drawing!
I started with creating some colour palettes with my art materials – for this design I used watercolour pencils, Inktense pencils, and some watered down acrylic paints.
Once I was happy with the colours, it was time to paint the motifs! I painted a few different lemons (whole and sliced) and also some washed-out stripes to use as a background. I paint on A4 sheets so they were easy to scan in.
Next came the more technical side – creating a repeat pattern! I scanned my finished paintings and opened the scanned images up in Photoshop.
For each motif, I erased the background and tidied up the edges of the image so I ended up with a clean motif. This can sometimes take awhile depending on how clear the edges of the image are when they are scanned.
Then its time to play! For this design I had no idea what I wanted it to look like, so I tried quite a few combinations….
I really liked the combination of pink and yellow lemon motifs with the blue striped background (thinking of my key words of summer, fun, and bright!), and I ended up with a few different variations of this pattern! If you follow me on social media you may remember I had a hard time deciding which variation to submit as my final design!
This is where mockups helped! I found some free fabric mockups online so I could see what my patterns looked like ‘in real life’.
And now my design ‘pink lemonade’ is available to purchase on fabric or wallpaper from Spoonflower!
I am really interested to see what it will be used for – I want to make some napkins for myself.
