More Voynich manuscript influenced flowers this week, experimenting with line and a softer texture in Procreate.

These spiky leaves reminded me of peacock feathers, so I brought in the jewel colours.
I am getting the urge to work with these new Procreate sketches in watercolour, splotchy inks and maybe collage - let's see what next week brings.

And this was yesterday's Caturday post on Instagram, distracted by a butterfly and not looking where he's going in a cactus garden. I particularly enjoyed the expressive cacti with all the little dots.

Still running along with Voynich inspired flowers this week, I set up 6 small canvasses in Procreate and worked through them quite quickly. I like to work this way, as it stops overthinking, keeps the work fresh, and is great for generating new ideas.
I didn't expect to like the works as much as I do, intending them at first to be just small digital collage sketches so I didn't pay any attention to how I set up the canvasses at the beginning. I discovered subsequently that they are all 72dpi, too low a resolution to make prints - I had just quickly copied a master I use for Instagram post, whereas I normally work at 300dpi. I had envisaged the six pictured above to be no larger than 15cm a piece if they were prints.

I had a refresh of colours, textures and subject matter this week. These flowering cactus collages (made inProcreate) had been hanging around in my workspace for a while but something wasn't gelling; however, a new approach to completely brought them to life. I wasted an awful lot of time trying unsuccessfully to get them to work (I liked the shapes and idea) until this refurbishment in new speckled textures and drawing captured exactly the right mood.

When I'm not designing patterns, I don't have to worry about making everything as clear as a cartoon. Close tones and subtlety are open to me, and these two cactus pieces were my favourites of the week's work. I particularly like the Japanese woodcut look of the blue one here - it's cool, flat and graphic yet soft, with its little pattern details derived from the spikes of a cactus.

These charming partying cats were created especially for Caturday on the May bank holiday weekend!

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I liked the folksy Caturday collage so much I rejigged it, together with the Easter egg birds collage, into a square with a folksy border. 

I especially had throw pillows in mind, but both designs look super on the products I selected! I still get a big thrill from seeing my work on Redbubble's products.

You can visit my Redbubble here to see more.
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I called this "A twist in the tail" (sorry!) - it is another Instagram post for Caturday which began as a square format but I reckoned it would make lovely art prints and cards, so here is a landscape version and how it looks as a framed print.
I was so pleased with this I went on to redesign the Easter eggs birds in a similar fashion to make a matching pair. This is currently work in progress in my spare time as I push on with the children's book, which is going extremely well and I am sure it will not be long until I can begin sharing some of the work.

I have been cutting out a lot of bird shapes in mulberry paper in Procreate recently, so I quickly collaged this together for an Easter post. - birds bringing Easter eggs. A very Happy Easter to you! Such a lovely time of the year, the days are getting longer and the sun is out and blossoms and buds are happening.

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It has been quite a busy week, in spite of the two bank holidays on Monday and Tuesday. I took down the Christmas decorations on Wednesday, which took all day; Thursday and Friday saw two social engagements, the first we have had for such a long time it was overwhelming! Having to take lateral flow tests and observe social bubbles adds quite a lot to a day with an event. I have been a couch potato ever since; this afternoon I am lounging on the sofa, laptop on knees, dressed stylishly in a fleece Minnie Mouse onesie and a dressing gown decorated with koala bears with ears on its hood, with a hot water bottle and a snuggly blanket to add luxury. I haven't made any new work since before the Christmas period, so today I'm posting the collage above which I made on the 19th December.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

I have become very interested in using a traditional drawing style to make sketches of my patterns this week, and looking for birds and other floral and blossoming motifs. A nervous line with a variety of weight over a favourite texture (ink bleed in Procreate on what I think must have been a photo of a grainy porch window at Wester Lix) is doing it for me right now. I'm already thinking Valentine's Day and spring.

Continuing the clean theme, I began a 'collaboration' with my younger self. A few years ago I was delighted to find an old design I had made in school. It must have been 1972-3 because at the bottom of the sheet there is a small pencil note: "Heather Walker 2 G 2"; I would have been 12 or 13 if that means form 2 at school, although I seem to recall being a little older when the design was made into a batik cushion cover.

Here is a detail of the original drawing from all those years ago. I have wanted to work with it for some time, and started copying it in the Yay Flowers cut-out collage style earlier this year, but it didn't work. It didn't want to be drawn like that and looked dated in the wrong kind of way, somehow lacking a fondness for the nostalgia of the 70s which surprised me, because I thought Yay Flowers looked quite 70s. I like the glow and all the textures of Yay Flowers, but perhaps I was already moving away from that grungy texture I was using last year and that's why it didn't work. I had a feeling it could just look dirty in print even back then. As soon as I began tracing in Procreate with a smooth, clear outline all the fun came back.

I had fun separating a few of the main motifs and experimenting with flat colour; now it looks 70s in the right way, with a clean and contemporary feel. I do like the juxtaposition of the flat line and colour work against grungy textures, but I know it wouldn't print well on Spoonflower so the final pattern will have a flat background. The thing to bear in mind is that fabric has its own texture and there's little need to add more, and when I am designing for a pattern I have to stop thinking like a painter and not make 'drawings of textiles', something I have done lots of times because of my interest in them - see September 2020, a month when that's almost all I did.

​Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

This one has kept me busy all week with enough going on in it to satisfy even my horror vacui. Flowers do make themselves from flowers, don't they? Above is a composition ahead of putting it into repeat, I rather liked the tall yellow stalk branching out into bunches of flower heads (just right of centre) but it didn't look good in a pattern, rather irritating actually, so I modified it to better suit the flow of a pattern in half-drop. Below is the result. I am loving the exuberant jollity and personalities of the flowers.

Instead of just uploading patterns to my Redbubble store, I have been turning my attention to wall art. Below is a rework of one of last year's pieces, and I was so encouraged by how charming it looks framed in my shop I went on to make the new composition above.

The variety of work and different dimensions certainly makes my Explore Designs page more exciting, taking it away from the strict grid into a naturally staggered flow which is easier on the eye. I have also begun to mix up the designs; I had been uploading patterns in different colourways one after the other so they were grouped together, but I think that looks a bit boring so now I am alternating patterns to work the colours. I discovered that's actually a fresher and enjoyable way to work anyway.

Here's a version from this week, a blue colourway of the birds and berries pattern I have been working on lately, but I also got out the vintage tie daisies pattern plus a few others to put into new colourways. Mixing it all up seems to be really improving the look of my page.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Last week's success reworking Yay Flowers! from 2020 inspired me to rework the Birds and Berries garden pattern I also made last year, but never used. I gave it a quick try on Redbubble at the time, but had concerns about it so I never launched it. Back then I was working by bouncing designs back and forth between iPad and Photoshop and it raised a few issues, such a line of just one pixel going missing etc - a minuscule difference, but enough to fault a good pattern, and although I tested the repeat thoroughly and it seemed fine in the end, I just didn't trust it.
I lost Photoshop when my very, very old MacBook finally died, but already had Procreate on iPad and was using that more and more. I won't subscribe to Adobe any more (don't approve, and can't afford it anyway) so nowadays no more Photoshop and I am working exclusively on my iPad Air. No, I don't have the wondrous Procreate 5 because it's only available for iPad Pro (which I also can't afford) but over the last few months I have worked out an idiosyncratic but completely practical way of making good patterns 'by hand', which I really enjoy; I can work in comfort at massively enlarged pixel scale for total accuracy. It's a kind of hybrid of the physical paper method and modern (well, sort of in my case) technology, and it certainly satisfies my inner jigsaw puzzler!
So, this week I had the confidence to get out my favourite pattern and rework it. I could only get it to work last year in merged form, solid state with background, so colour variations didn't really work. I rebuilt the pattern tile from scratch with elements I had filed away, and hey presto - colour separations!
​I love this silvery version (above), the original colourway is shown below. And yes, the pattern is going back onto my Redbubble store to play in all its colourways.

In May last year I made the above pattern which I called Yay Flowers! I only every produced it in one colourway as I was going through a process at the time of making patterns as a whole entity, with everything merged together. I made a new speckled repeating background for the original pattern, pictured above.
When I was drafting the idea for the pattern last year, I had produced an initial little composition which I liked a lot, but couldn't figure out how to use it at the time. I thought I would give it a go while I had the various artwork pieces out.
I keep the elements of patterns I really like so I can use them again, so I fetched the flower workings, rearranged them, created new stems, leaves, and a couple of new flowers, and colour separated at the same time. Below is a lovely, sombre version of the new pattern in velvety browns.

It has been a week of colourways, I also worked a few for last week's British Meadows pattern . I particularly liked this soft blue and lilac version, quite dreamy.

This is a new pattern I have been working on this week, using the risograph textures I made earlier. I'll add more about it here later, but I'm off to watch the football and have some dinner now!

​Thanks for visiting, see you next week

I worked two more colourways of my latest pattern during the week. I like to limit the number of colours for such patterns to no more than five, plus a background colour. It partly comes from my training as a graphic artists in the print industry in the early-mid '90s, working with colour separations to produce one printing plate for each colour for the offset litho process. I enjoyed seeing how an image was composed by unravelling the colours.

Below is a photo of a little Christmas card I had made at the printers back then, the colour separations can be seen clearly because something I loved to do was emphasise the hand-made quality by making the separations miss here and there. The negative spaces are activated and appear white because of the surrounding colours, although it is printed on a buff coloured laid paper. Interestingly, I bought a new duvet cover from George at Asda recently where the designer had done exactly the same thing in making the separations 'miss', which adds a considerable amount of charm to the pattern.

More recently, when I was working on the daisy pattern based on a 1970s neck-tie, I was surprised to find only five separations plus the background, in spite of looking like a riot of colour. Naturally, working in Procreate or any application which uses layers, I keep one layer per colour and limiting the colours  means putting a design into repeat is very much faster; if I can stick to four like this new pattern it makes life a lot easier. I find fewer colours make a more cohesive pattern and I enjoy the challenge of working within limitations, which is just as well with my comparatively  archaic methods.
My Redbubble shop has become a wonderful playground where I can see my patterns on a variety of products - I randomly present a framed art print and a pair of socks today!