Color Workshop Week 11: Playing with Pattern

This week, I was excited to attempt some pattern designs for Color Workshop. I came up with two patterns in black and white that I’m fairly happy with. I say this after many (what I consider to be) failed attempts at executing many ideas. I tried to step out of my comfort zone and try more illustrative patterns than geometric patterns. I came up with a number of motifs I liked, but I really had difficulty making them work in pattern. I felt like there was no natural flow between my translations… it all just ended up look like one contained motif repeated a bunch of times.

I ended up going with a number of geometric forms I sketched, scanned, live traced, then edited and tiling them into pretty simple pattern. As a rule, I often like patterns that are simple geometrics (I’m super picky when it comes to pattern), so I really wanted to create patterns that I would actually put in my home or on my body. I think that’s partially why the more illustrative patterns didn’t work for me.

I love simple, irregular geometric forms arranged in highly graphic ways. When sketching and designing, I kept squinting my eyes to get a better feel for the overall figure/ground relationship… something I never would have done before grad school. I like the playful, irregular edges of the shapes I created and I think they work with my Lush Leaf green theme. They are irregular and imperfect (as nature can be), but they are still crisp, bold and striking. I guess these patterns combine the organic/earthy and the crisp freshness that I’m communicating with my color.

A variation of the first pattern on diagonal grid.

Playful leaf/seed shapes. This is the shape I imagine Lush Leaf green to be.

To follow are a few of my sketches and my process work in Illustrator. I did a lot of sketching and on trace paper, which I’d like to do more in the future. I’d really like to improve my sketching ability.

Illustrator work:

Color Workshop Week 11: Exploring Pattern in Interior Design

Decor Maison is a wallpaper company from Sweden, whose products are sold in Europe. Their English website is rather off-putting, but their work is amazing. I love the bold, geometric nature of the patterns, inspired by nature and I think this is a direction I want to pursue with my pattern designs for my color book.

These mobile home setups are adorable.

Aaand some more nature-inspired home decorating patterns from Claire Nicolson. She works with many different grid/pattern structures. Her patterns are lovely and whimsical, very vintage-/folk-inspired, very much to my liking.

Radial

Assymetrical

Linear Repeating

Reflection

I like the idea of applying pattern to a pillow because it doesn’t have a sense of permanence attached to it. The volume distorts the pattern slightly, but not as much as a piece of furniture or curtains would.

Three Artists, Three Approaches to Texture and Color

Chicago artist Dzine does amazing acrylic paintings, installations and random vehicle pimpings. Dzine always considers the texture of his work. In his many of his paintings (see second image below) he incorporates glass bits or other objects into his the paint, lending a irregular surface to bold, graphic patterns. His pimped bike and boat installations always use shiny, liquid-y materials, luxurious textures and complimentary lighting. Fantastic.

Matt W. Moore has lots of different work in his portfolio, but what I love most are these colorful geometric patterns. These particular patterns show a different instance of texture in color, or rather, no texture. His work has an illuminated, precise, digital-y quality to it, much different than the painting above. In comparison with the other two artists, this work has a more flat feeling. Still, I love the organic nature of the piece below, the irregular edges and the way the pattern seems to grow.

Mat Daly (yes, one “t”) uses irregular geometric screens and rich color palettes to create beautiful abstracted scenes. He uses transparency to create texture, tonal variation, and depth in a very tangible (non-digital) way. This makes me desperately want to learn silk screen and get off the computer.

Amazing geometric color studies

This is the work of Andy Gilmore, a designer based in Rochester, NY. I love love love his work.

Color Workshop Week 9: Inspired by Pattern

This week for Color Workshop, we had to look for examples of three different types of pattern. I apologize in advance for not crediting the creators of most of these patterns. I found them in a voracious fit of Google image searching.

1. Patterns of a chaotic nature. These are often nature inspired and have a non-obvious line of symmetry. The above examples are from one of my favorite illustrators, Sanna Annukka. Here are two more patterns of a similar nature.

I’m not sure at what point it stops being a pattern and starts being of more of a random nature, but I love this one above.

2. Regular, repeating geometric patterns. This one is pretty easy. There are so many things to love about a great geometric pattern. These sorts of pattern can offer a great view of a historical period’s aesthetic. The trend has begun to fade, but the whole Victorian revival thing was really going for a while (see image below).

I love this cheerful 1960′s pattern.

This one is from the Richard Rhys Pattern Foundry.

3. Patterns composed of two patterns. These can be photographic in nature, based in typography, or something else. I found a selection of typographic patterns. I love the range of color to black and white, traditional to modern, linear (the last two) to repeating geometric.

Color Workshop: First Pages of My Color Book

Color Workshop Week 8: Yellow-Green in the Real World

This was spring break, but no break for Lizzie as I had piles of work to catch up on. I spent the week beginning my Color Trend book and doing tons of image research.

First off is a pile of images I took of plants in my apartment. Since the theme for my color book is yellow-green as youthfulness, freshness and reverence for nature, I think I might use some of these in my book.

Next I researched yellow-green in food. Because of my undying love of avocado, I collected a pile of images from the web of avocados. It’s interesting to see the colors paired with the yellow-ish avocado green. The complement, red-violet, appears in the form of beets. I thought yellow-green with sweet potato orange and grapefruit red are particularly beautiful combinations.

Lastly, I took a trip to Home Depot in Bed-Stuy and collected a pile of yellow-green paint chips and inspiration booklet thingies from the paint section.

These rooms aren’t really my style, but they use yellow-green in various schemes, some better than others.

I love the combination of bright yellow-green with a medium blue (on the left above, especially).