The end of the year is my busiest season, in preparation for Christmas and New Year festivities and shopping. So of course it makes complete (non)sense to be taking another e-course at this exhausting time, right? Am playing catch-up on a constant basis but I wouldn't have it any other way, as the course I'm on right now, The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, is absolutely brilliant and wonderfully inspiring.
I've made time, to allow that inspiration to seep through -- and I've managed to create a simple, hopefully cheerful, pattern. I've tried to move away a bit from my usual colour palette and try the more subtle hues for a change. here are the steps I went through:
- I picked something right in front of me to draw. My ever-present teacup seemed a good candidate, so I played around with a few sketches, drew it in an slightly more abstract style based upon it's silhouette, and then of course mangled it a bit to make it thoroughly imperfect.
- I then drew it out on the page several times and added flying drops and spirals (thought of rising steam and winged it from there), and coloured it in with marker pens ...
- and then outlined it in gray to see how that would look,
- But finally outlined everything in black so that the scanner would pick it up.
I was working to colours I had picked from a photo I had set aside specifically for this drawing:
Finally, with the above colours still in mind, I cleaned it up a bit in Corel Painter 12 and Photoshop and this was the end result:
Ok, so it's a wee bit on the simplistic side, but there's a certain light-heartedness to it that I quite like, what do you think? Am going to play around a bit more with the colours and hues to see what else turns up. Cheers!
