My year of making a pattern every week - the first 3 months
#52patternsayear
Back in the late summer of 2022, I was scrolling on Instagram and came across a new pattern challenge that was being set up by Graphic Designer and Small Biz Brand Boss Liz Mosely (@lizmmosley) and artist Océane Meftah (@papergraphie). The concept was to create 52 patterns in a year – or one pattern a week – following a list of prompts provided by Liz and Océane and sharing your designs with their Insta community.
Challenges like this appeal to me on so many levels, but I’d never committed to one over such a long timescale before. Usually, I’ll do an art challenge that involves drawing every day for a month, or creating a painting every day for 7 days. Whilst I already have a portfolio of around 50 surface pattern designs that I’ve been working on over the past 18 months, the thought of creating a pattern every week for a whole year was still a little bit daunting as it would more than double the size of my portfolio. My main concern was that the way I prefer to make patterns usually involves the creation of original hand-drawn and/or hand-coloured elements and motifs, that I then digitise, process and use to create seamless repeat pattern tiles. This can be quite a lengthy process…
However, I thought the benefits of participating would more than outweigh any negatives and decided to commit to the process: 1 seamless pattern (and associated artwork), created from scratch each week and shared with the Instagram challenge hashtag for a whole year!
My first 3 months in review
It didn’t help that I was exceptionally busy through September and into October, meaning that I was delayed even starting the challenge (which kicked-off in October 2022). Although I did manage to create some artwork following the prompts, I didn’t manage to turn anything into a pattern. (Although you can see that I managed more in the way of illustration development as the weeks went by!)
I promised myself that November would be different.
I set aside actual time for my artwork creation and pattern design and, low-and-behold, created 4 designs that month. Looking back now, I can see it also helped that for some of the November prompts, I decided to go ‘off book’ in terms of my art creation. Rather than detailed watercolour and ink illustrations, I experimented with rough inky sketches (for the prompts of ‘feet’ and ‘lips’) and watercolour effects within simple shapes (for the prompts of ‘cell’ and ‘heart’). Whilst this resulted in patterns that were different to my usual style, it did mean that I was expanding my portfolio in a new and different way.
Having seemingly mastered the habit and the process in November, unfortunately my December was derailed by Covid, which wiped me out for almost 3 weeks! Much like in October, I found I was reverting to my usual illustration style of detailed line work and watercolour painting, which wasn’t giving me enough time to focus on the pattern design part of the process.
So what have I learnt from my first quarter of participating in this weekly pattern challenge?
I love the convenience of not having to think of pattern themes/motifs, but I also enjoy that the brief itself isn’t too restricted (I often struggle with the Spoonflower weekly pattern design challenges as they have more parameters that need to be met in terms of colours/approach/style/application).
I already knew that I needed some form of accountability in order to push me to create new pattern designs. I’ve realised that I need to actively schedule in time to produce the work to ensure that it happens. Although there is absolutely no pressure from the challenge organisers or other creatives to post each pattern every week, I find that just knowing that the hashtag and the community exists is enough to give me a sense of external accountability that gives me that extra push to keep creating.
I get a sense of satisfaction from completing my pattern and uploading it each week, which is gratifying. On the flip side, this means that in the two months where I didn’t manage to complete the challenge, I had to fight quite hard not to give up altogether/feel deflated by not getting my weekly ‘gold star’ for completing a pattern.
I was initially concerned about having to respond to prompts that didn’t ‘resonate’ with me. I’m usually most inspired by wildlife, nature, landscape and architecture – so I knew that a lot of the artwork that I’d need to create by joining this challenge would be outside my usual sphere. As it happens, I’ve quite enjoyed this and I’m planning to lean into it further as the year progresses, by purposely trying to tie weekly prompts together into a collection, as well as trying new approaches and techniques.. For example, I’m currently planning my designs for February and am going to explore creating vector/graphic motifs. At some point in the year I’ll also hopefully get to experiment with creating my motifs in different physical media (charcoal, screen printing, lino cutting, etc) – whatever feels like it lends itself well to the prompt list.
I also worried that I might fall prey to the old adage that ‘comparison is the thief of joy’ and that by seeing what other people have created each week, it might make worse my feelings of imposter syndrome. In actual fact, I’ve really enjoyed looking at how different people’s styles are and have been able to consciously accept that whilst my approach might be ‘different’ it doesn’t mean it is ‘wrong’!
I’ll post an update in March that will hopefully contain the full set of 13 weeks of patterns (spoiler alert - I’ve already crushed January!)
Follow along (or join in!) with the #52PatternsAYear challenge on Instagram