One of my pattern designs that is now available through Digital Fabrics is Blue Lagoon.

This is a detailed and bold pattern in tones of Pantone’s Classic Blue, featuring tropical photographic motifs of hibiscus, shells, and foliage.

I am really proud of this design as it has a fantastic three dimensional quality, is very tropical and bold, yet the use of one main colour also gives it a nice subtlety.

This design came about as a result of one of Spoonflower’s weekly design challenges. The theme was to create a design using just four tones of Pantone’s Colour of the Year 2020 – Classic Blue.

Each year, Pantone chooses a colour that they believe is most relevant to what is happening across the world with colour influences. When a colour is selected as Colour of the Year you can expect to see this colour across fashion, homewears, interior design, to name a few. The influence of Colour of the Year cannot be underestimated – Millennial Pink anyone?

The theory behind the selection of Classic Blue is quite interesting and well worth reading about.

So back to my design – I initially struggled with this design challenge as most of my designs are quite bright and as you can see, Classic Blue is definitely not bright.

The first thing I did was to play around with some of my artwork in Photoshop, colouring it in the four tones of Classic Blue:

I was not happy at all with this initial design idea, it was quite boring to me and not really my style.

So I decided to try something completely different, and that was to use my photographs to create a design.

I first came across this technique when I did a stencil art workshop with Sculley Design (which was so much fun, my first time using a spray can!). Basically you use the Threshold function in Photoshop to create an image that can be used for stencil art. I played with the idea a bit to create purely digital stencil art.

Here is an example using a photo of my daughter:

I used this same technique using my photographs of tropical motifs, such as hibiscus flowers and cone shells.

Here is one of the original photographs, a beautiful hibiscus from Norfolk Island:

And what it looks like converted to a stencil using the four tones of Classic Blue:

This is actually a really easy technique and so effective – if you would like me to write a blog post tutorial about how to do this, please let me know in the comments below!

After creating a number of stencil images in the tones of Classic Blue, I put them together in Photoshop and created a half-drop repeat pattern. I like making half-drop repeats as depending on the design, it can make the pattern flow quite well.

Here is the end result – Blue Lagoon!

It is always great to imagine what a design will look like in real life, and that’s where mockups come in. Here are a few imaginings for Blue Lagoon:

The best news is, my Blue Lagoon pattern design can be printed on a variety of fabrics through Digital Fabrics!

art process Classic Blue design surface pattern design textile design