asking for trouble

How I Designed My Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

This post was originally shared on Patreon but now I’m making it public. I love creating repeat patterns and here’s how I designed my Spring Flowers patterns

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

People often ask how I come up with ideas – sometimes I need to sketch or experiment with a few different things and other times I figure it all out in my head before I start. This is one where I already had the design in my head and it worked out as I planned. I don’t want to be all ‘IT CAME TO ME IN A DREAM!’ – it’s more that before I have time to work on something, I’ve had plenty spare moments to think about it and plan it all out.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

1. I pulled all the flower (and plant I guess, sorry clover!) heads I wanted to use into a new Illustrator file and chose a nice sky blue background. I included the whole screen here, as I know some people love seeing this stuff. My laptop screen is tiny so everything is squished in.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

2. For the first pattern, I just wanted a straight repeat so I made all the elements the same size and spaced them out in a row.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

3. Repeat it a few times and then use the Align and Distribute buttons to make sure everything is lined up and spaced out exactly the same.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

4. Group the row together and paste a few more rows…

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

5. …then offset alternate rows. This is all done by eye really to get a nice spacing and pattern. Usually I have to go back a step or two and change the spacing until I’m happy. This pattern is essentially done but we’ll come back to it.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

6. I also wondered what a polka dot pattern would look like and moved elements around on a new layer until I ended up with this.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

7. Quick check of the repeat (by literally pasting extra copies – the sunflowers are doubled up) and I liked it enough to go ahead. At some point here I tried a bunch of different background colours and decided on the blue and green.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

8. Over to Photoshop to create the repeat file. You can do repeats in Illustrator but I just prefer Photoshop. I create a canvas that is the size of a cushion cover for my on-demand stores as it helps me visualise the scale. I’ve pulled in both my patterns without backgrounds on to separate layers and will duplicate the file later when I work on the second one. I’ve started with the polka dots and resized it to a scale I like.

(Look how quickly I was working! I started at 3:37 and now it’s just 4pm)

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

9. My patterns are often quite busy so the repeat area needs to be exact to the pixel. This one has plenty space but I do it the same way anyway. I like to use a character face as the corners as it’s easy to set guides in the right place and spot mistakes in the repeat. Plus you can create the pattern with a transparent background without confusing Photoshop (since it will ignore any transparent areas when you copy and paste).

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

10. I do this at the same place in 4 corners of the design to create the repeat area.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

11. I test it on a much bigger file at different sizes to make sure it works. If the repeat is wrong it is very obvious! I really like how this one looks at a tiny scale and might have to do a plain polka dot co-ordinate in the same colours.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

12. Then I crop it, save a copy, change the background to blue and save another copy. And also save the original in case I get a request for a different background colour etc.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

13. On to the other pattern. It’s exactly the same process.

14. After that, I upload the designs to Spoonflower and come up with the title, description and tags. I try to do this first so I can order test swatches as they sometimes take a couple of weeks to arrive.

Designing my Spring Flowers Repeat Patterns

15. And here’s the printed fabric! The colours look great but I decided to scale up the polka dots a little as you couldn’t see the faces. You can now buy these from Spoonflower.

Spring Flowers kawaii products

The final job is adding them to my print-on-demand sites – Redbubble, Society6, TeePublic & Zazzle. This is quite tedious but I may share the process in future. I’ve also written some previous posts about how I create different types of repeat patterns.

marceline

Hello! I’m Marceline Smith, the designer and owner of Asking For Trouble. I create illustrated stationery, accessories and gifts using my cute characters inspired by Japanese kawaii. This is my business and personal blog where I write about my creative doings, inspirations, travels, Japan trips and daily life. Read more »


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