Here is the final group of surface patterns I created during Make it in Design Winter School 2018, from the Advanced Track creative briefs.

This was definitely my favourite track out of all 3, I loved the first creative brief so much that I'm creating a whole collection from it and I got totally carried away with the second brief and different colourways, I have plans for those designs too.

The first creative brief was titled American Prarie, which, after reading the brief I thought I might struggle with this one but once I got going with it everything just fell into place.

I think I may make a pinafore dress out of this Dusty Floral fabric.

The second brief was called Fauna Cyanotype and was based on the Cyanotype process. I experimented with a few floral motifs but in the end I settled on using the one simple leaf motif layered in various colours.

But then I started tweaking colours, I tried using grey for one of the leaves instead of black,

Then I went off on a dusky pink tangent, I really like how this turned out.

I then switched in a dark charcoal background, I do love dark backgrounds,

I could only submit one of these designs to the Winter School Gallery so in the end I chose this one...

One of the things I love most though is receiving a parcel containing fabric samples of my latest designs!

I can't wait to get the sewing machine out!

Today I'm sharing the pattern I created on the Intermediate Track of the Make It In Design Winter School 2018. 

I was taking all 3 tracks of Winter School - Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced so had 3 creative briefs to work with and a 10 day submission deadline. I decided to start with this one first out of all of them as I'm fairly confident with florals and floral motifs and I do like colourful patterns, my thinking was that I'm comfortable with this one so start with it and that will get the creativity flowing for the other two briefs.

In the end this brief took me longer to complete than both of the other two together, but using this one as a creativity kickstarter really did work for me and this is certainly an approach to designing patterns and prints that I will be using again.

I thought I'd share a little bit of my pattern creation process, I always start with pencil sketches, I normally have around 5-6 A4 pages of possible motifs and choose my favourites from those for the design I'm working on.

 Once I've sketched the initial motifs in pencil I then ink them in and scan them onto my laptop. Even though I won't use every single motif I've drawn in my sketching stage I still ink them up and scan them in as there's every chance I will use them at some point in the future, you can never have too many motifs. 

Once I've cleaned all of the motifs in Photoshop, I pick my colour palette, for this pattern I used the one that came with the brief, I then started to colour all of the motifs and layer them onto a square tile in Photoshop, when I've done that and I'm happy with the pattern I then repeat the tile in a larger square tile and bingo!  

Floral Explosion!

I ran out of time to complete the second creative brief, Kabuki's Kingdom, for this track but I'm going to get that one done as soon as possible.

Thanks for stopping by!