In this blog post I’m going to give you a sneak peak into how I design for a client brief.
My client asked for a pattern design that was hand-painted with watercolours, including fish and the world. My client also supplied a colour palette of their preferred colours.
The first step I took was to brainstorm the idea of watercolour fish and how to incorporate the world. I like to spend some time on Pinterest gathering inspiration and imagery to use in my moodboard.
The concept I presented to the client was a directional pattern with different tropical fish, one of which was painted with the earth as the body. I included a rough sketch of the pattern, with imagery from Pinterest showing the colours, mood, and look I was after.
The client loved this concept (yay) and so the next step was creating the artworks, or motifs as they are known in the pattern design world.
I used watercolours to paint a number of fish in bright colours, as well as the star of the show which was the fish with the earth as it’s body.
Once I had painted the fish and smaller coral motifs, I created a couple of quick patterns to show the client what it was looking like – basically I wanted to check if they were happy with the colours, scale, direction, and general look.
This was the first design presented to the client:
I had amazing feedback from the client about the pattern I presented, so I then used their colour palette to create a few different options for them to use:
This was a really fun brief for me, I enjoyed the creative challenge of painting fish with the world and I’m happy with how the pattern design turned out. Most importantly the client was extremely happy and pleased with the patterns I created for them.
If you have a project you need a pattern or illustration for, I’d love to chat and see if we can work together on something fun and magical!