My year of making a pattern every week - Spring update
#52patternsayear
I’ve written previously about why I decided to participate in the #52patternsayear challenge to create a seamless repeat pattern every week for a year (see My year of making a pattern a week - the first 3 months). If you’ve read my first post about the experience, you’ll know that I had a somewhat mixed success rate in terms of being able to create my weekly patterns - but I’m pleased to be able to say that I haven’t missed a week in my second quarter of the challenge! I’ve also used the challenge to start to experiment with different styles and approaches for creating my patterns, as well as developing my Affinity Designer skills with a whole month of vector-based graphics!
January
I decided I wanted to use the January prompts to create a connected collection of patterns around the theme of ‘Self-care’. The five prompts for January were:
Candles
Wellness
Soup
Home
Socks
I stuck to my comfort zone of creating my motifs in pen and watercolour by hand, before digitizing and creating my patterns in Affinity Designer, but did use the same colour palette throughout to help tie the designs together. I created three of the patterns in a brick repeat and two as a half-drop, which also helps to give the collection some coherence.
My favourite pattern from January is definitely Cosy Toes!
February
The February prompts had a ‘winter’ thread running through them: Snowboard, Mountain, Bobble Hat, and Boot.
This was the month when I decided to stretch myself by creating my pattern elements digitally using the Vector persona in Affinity Designer. I had hoped that this would be a quicker way of creating patterns, but in actuality it took me just as long as hand-drawing and painting my motifs! However, I really enjoyed the experience and I like the look that the vector-based approach allowed me to create, with the clean lines - although it does feel quite removed from my usual style. It is also the first time I’ve ever included people in a design as I shy away from drawing them, but something about the graphic style meant I felt braver about tackling the subject! As the month wore on, I also became more ambitious in terms of using more of the tools in Affinity Designer to create textures and other effects.
March
Spring hadn’t really arrived and we were still experiencing snow and icy temperatures, so it was a little strange to be creating artwork for the prompts of:
Daffodil
Birds
Outdoors
Bicycle
The first two prompts made me think of well-known poems by two of the English Romantic poets - Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud and Shelley’s To a Skylark. I therefore ended up creating a repeat pattern for these first two prompts, but also a stand-alone art print (where I got the chance to practice my hand-lettering!) I had intended to continue this through the month, but was somewhat lacking in inspiration for the final two prompts in terms of matching them to poems, so I ended up just creating the seamless patterns for the prompts of Outdoors and Bicycle. The four designs did end up being somewhat linked by the watercolour stripe background I included across the four patterns, but I think these are generally stand-alone rather than a collection.
I really enjoyed creating the art prints for the Daffodils and Bird prompts, and the Outdoors design, where I was able to incorporate a bit of a story within the motifs I drew and painted with washing escaping from the clothes line and blowing through the air. However, the pattern I like most from March is definitely my Spring Bicycles!
What have I learnt in this second quarter?
I’m really enjoying participating in this challenge and trying new things, although it is definitely still quite a time-consuming task each week on top of my other work. It is helping me to let go of ‘perfect’ and recognise that I won’t necessarily like all of the designs I’m producing. But also that I’ve been surprised by the patterns that I’ve enjoyed making the most, which have usually been the ones where I’ve felt I’ve been able to successfully realise the ideas in my head.
Follow along (or join in!) with the #52PatternsAYear challenge on Instagram
Interested in purchasing?
I’m slowly making all of the designs from this challenge available in my Spoonflower shop if you’d like to purchase any of these patterns as fabric, wallpaper or as an item of home decor. All of these designs are also available for licensing - please just get in touch if you’d like to discuss terms.