For my children’s book I want to add in some of my surface pattern designs I have hand painted and made in to technical repeat patterns from. I want to add these into my illustrations because I think it will add a unique style and something that is known as my style. I think it add’s great texture and interest into the illustrations too.
Here are a few illustrations I painted for Folktale week on Instagram, you can see the surface pattern designs I used in each picture, and also in different ways I used the repeat patterns to add that interest.
This was a re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood, you can see I have used a poppy pattern design that I added to Red ridings cloak to add that point of interest.
Adding surface pattern on the characters clothes is a good way to add that impact, its the most simplest way to implement it.
Here I have used some flower patterns to use as some of the flower blooms in this Unicorn illustration. This one is more hidden so you have to look for the flowers (bottom right hand side), I think this is good for children’s books as they can see new things each time they look at the book, or when adults read it to them. Hiding the pattern design or collage is a good way to get the reader to explore the illustrations.
Alice in wonderland – I used a dragonfly pattern for the background wallpaper in this illustration, I think it adds another layer to the picture, texture and depth. I think the colours, subject and design complement the rest of the illustrations and work well as a whole.
Adding surface pattern as a background is good to help add interest and busyness into a maybe flat illustration.
I have added a few of my pattern designs below, these are ones I have picked out and think will work in some way in this new book of ‘The Gardening Angel’. Most of the patterns I have designed are florals, botanicals or animal designs, which I think will work best as a style to go with a potentially nature/ garden book. All of these are copyrighted by myself as part of my surface pattern portfolio.
This one is called Ethereal Peony, and is all hand painted in watercolours as separate elements then layered as a repeat pattern.
This one is called Hydrangea and Bee. (hand painted)
This one is called Lily. (hand painted)
This one’s called Nan’s Garden. (hand painted and digital)
This one is called Botanical lily and is a digital design.
This is another digital design and is called Scatter-green.
This is another hand painted design with loose watercolours, and is called Watercolour blush.
Again a hand painted design in watercolours, I thought this would work well as a pond!? and is called Dragonfly and lily pad.
Again another insect design, this is called Textured lady bug. This is half hand painted and half digital in design.
I am going to add these patterns into some of the roughs I have drawn of the page spreads to see how they would work, and whether I can pull together all the elements and make it work as a whole illustration spread.
I will be doing this digitally, although most of the design’s are hand painted to get the pattern integrated into the picture it has to be layered digitally by using Illustrator software or Procreate on the iPad.
It does look like collage but I like the mix of surface pattern that looks like collage, I think it looks more seamless.
I’m excited to see how this will work out, if the designs need to be a bit simpler I do have some ditsy or just stripe designs that I could try out too.
So I tried out some of the ideas above on some of the rough illustration pages, to see how this would look.
The first one I did was the pattern on Flora’s dungarees, so for clothing.
I really liked this one, and thought the pattern I chose worked well for the dungarees, I would have to try this again at the finishing stages of the book, just to make sure the pattern didn’t clash too much with the garden art work, it maybe too busy, or not show up enough, if there are similar flowers in the flower illustrations. Overall I think this is a success.
The next one I chose was to add the surface pattern into the back ground, no this one is hard to see as I haven’t painted the illustration of Flora and the bee yet, so you can fully tell what it would look like. I have reduced the opacity slightly so the background is not so bright and bold. But I don’t know whether this would work, and again maybe clash or the hand painted parts not stand out so much. This is the design I am least confident about.
Next was using a surface pattern to fill in one of the trees with, I chose the green pattern with the bird (blue tit) as I thought this would work the best. Again I like the idea of this, it’s to see how it would look without the rest hand painted, but the concept here I am pleased with.
The last design I tried was using surface pattern on the foliage of a plant, this was similar to one of the illustrations I created for Folktale week. I chose a digital design this time to see the difference between the and painted patterns and the digitally created ones, I chose a simpler design also to see how that would work. Again I am pleased with how this looks, I think it works well. I don’t know whether the seething would stay in place over the top of the pattern or get taken away, it’s something to think about and try.
So the way I intend to use the surface pattern is not by having for example every tree in the green bird pattern, it would just be on one or two trees on a particular spread, it wouldn’t be consistent throughout the book. Now this may change if it doesn’t work well, or is too confusing for the reader. I would like to just add in a piece of surface pattern into each spread, but something different in each one. A tree on one spread, a plant on another spread, a background on a spot, or on clothing on some other spreads.
This will be trial and error, and will probably be worked on more, once I have the hand painting completed and set for the whole book, the surface pattern will be added and trialled at the end.
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