Following my tutorial with Matt i have selected a design that he liked and started to develop it into a repeat pattern. Instead of just taking the first illustration i did i decided to redraw it, taking inspiration from all the illustrations throughout my sketchbook.
To start i selected a 0.2, 0.5 and 0.8 weighted pens to give myself a range of line thickness. After creating the first section of the repeat i reflected on this and realise there was no obvious difference between the 0.2 and 0.5 so decided to just use the 0.2 and 0.8. I have used the thicker pen for the outlines, eyes and the outline of the mouths to highlight them. Then i used the 0.2 for finer details such as textures and teeth. I feel this nicely varies certain aspects.
Once happy with my design i scanned it into illustrator and image traced it. However, because some of the details were so fine no matter how much i played with the threshold in image trace they were not apparent on screen. To combat this i brought the original design into Photoshop and played with the brightness, exposure and contrast to make the lines bolder before bringing the design back into illustrator.
Once happy with the image tracing result i recieved i started playing around with positioning the design so i could fill in the gaps to make it repeat. First of all i went for a brick repeat and then started filling in the gaps with my wacom tablet and the pen tool on illustrator. Unfortunately because of how much illustrator tends to smooth out the lines i struggled creating the same style in a digital format. Although you can go back though and edit the points along each line with the direct selection tool, i still feel the digital and hand drawn elements did not match up.
After knowing creating the same style was going to be a lot harder than i first thought i decided to experiment with a range of other repeats which would minimise the gap between each motif, in the hope that as i have less space to fill the more time i can spend editing each line to ensure it matched up.
For the design bellow i still went for a brick repeat, however; moved the motifs slightly off centre to see if this would help and also flipped the design vertically. Although this did minimise the gaps I wanted to carry on experimenting as felt i could do better. The benefit with reflecting the design however, is that the happy birthday text has now been flipped upside down which makes the wrapping paper more versatile providing more ways to wrap the present without it seeming upside down.
I then went on and simply tried to rotate the design at odd angles; however, still so the text would be upsidown. Although i feel like i am reaching my target a lot better i still feel dramatic improvements can be made.
Liking the rotational aspect i then tried it around a single central point. Once again although thinking this has a lot less negative space for myself to fill in there is still too much.
From here i will go back to this design and redraw it so it fits nicely into a more even square. By doing this it will give me less space to fill once bring it into a digital format. As well as this i would like to make the happy birthday text bigger as i do not feel it stands out enough compared to the rest of the design. Once i am happy with the repeat of the design i will then start to add colour.
BA Hons Textiles Consultancy Blog 