As promised, a look at some of my process in re-drawing and simplifying my Pineapple character and turning it into a repeat pattern.
I drew my first batch of 5 A Day characters back in 2013 when my Illustrator skills were not the greatest. The Pineapple was one of the more complicated fruits and so I’ve never been able to use it for things like stamps. After simplifying it, all those random translucent leaves are gone, the main leaves are symmetrical, and the…umm…spiky fruit bits are changed to a reversed wave pattern. It’s still definitely a pineapple, but more of a cuter simpler Baby Pineapple that fits my current illustration style better.
I had been thinking a scattered pattern would work for this but it looked too messy and I tried being more geometric. There were too many annoying gaps here though so I moved on.
Turning the pineapples the other way round looked much better, and once I noticed that they looked like flowers when zoomed out, I knew I ad to put the sun back in.
Bingo! After fiddling around with the spacing, that was ready to crop into a repeat and start using.
And here’s how it looks on clothing. You can find it on loads of fun products at my print-on-demand stores now, plus it will be on Spoonflower once I have enough new designs for test swatches. If you prefer the old Pineapple, it’s one of my biggest sellers as Redbubble stickers (who knows why?) so it will be staying up alongside the new one.
