Pattern Design Story – Dot’s Spots

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.

a leopard shark at Julian Rocks

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:

photo of scanned artwork to show the pattern design story of Dot's Spots
scanned artwork of watercolour shavings on wet paper

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.

photo of leopard shark that is part of the pattern design story of Dot's Spots
Dot with her white spot just behind the gills

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:

image of repeat pattern design of animal print and rainbows
the original colourway of Dot’s Spots

I then created a couple more colourways:

Dot’s Spots in shades of blue
Dot’s Spots in blue and white

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 🙂

photo of lady wearing a dress in a spotty bright pattern
Dot’s Spots imagined as a dress

One Reply to “Pattern Design Story – Dot’s Spots”

  1. […] DOT’S SPOTS in Australia or overseas or read the story behind this […]

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