Dot’s Spots is one of my most-loved repeat pattern designs that I created last year – this is the pattern design story!

It is inspired by one of my favourite underwater creatures – the leopard shark.

Leopard sharks are just beautiful animals to see underwater, they are calm and gentle and remind me of dogs! I have often seen them diving in summer in Australia and have a few photos from places like Julian Rocks at Byron Bay and Manta Bommie at North Stradbroke Island.

I used my underwater photographs of leopard sharks and drew over the markings using Procreate to create the overall pattern.

I went back and forth between Procreate and Photoshop to get these markings into a seamless pattern repeat.

The next step was to add some colour! I saw this cool effect on an art tutorial video where you sprinkle watercolour pencil shavings over wet watercolour paper – this was the result:

I turned this artwork into a repeat in Photoshop and used it as the background of the leopard shark markings.

Now for something really cool – did you know leopard sharks have unique spotted patterns that can be used to identify individuals? One of the sharks I have photos of is called Dot as she has a small white dot on her side. I found this out after sending my leopard shark photos to the leopard shark ID project.

I love adding white dots to my artworks so of course I was inspired by this particular shark to add little white dots to my final design:

I then created a couple more colourways:

So that is the pattern design story of Dot’s Spots. Most exciting of all, the Australian company Chook n Duck is currently making custom clothing using this pattern design – I have ordered a skirt which I can’t wait to wear! Kiaraleigh from Chook n Duck actually suggested the name Dot’s Spots!

Let me know below if you enjoyed this post 🙂

art process design inspiration diving leopard shark pattern surface pattern design underwater photography