​Okay, it's getting weird now, so I'm going -
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I came across a Spoonflower printing review on the wonderful Tuppence Ha'penny Vintage website last week. This paragraph confirmed what I thought: "The DPI isn’t as high as some other services, so some very fine detail may not come out and the lines may not be razor-sharp, but that’s not a negative for me - I rely on that very tiny bit of dye bleed to give it a more authentically vintage feel."

An exciting start to the week when my first ever sampler from Spoonflower arrived on Monday morning for proofing. I worked in the print industry for a number of years, so I am no stranger to proofing, or finding unexpected results and learning from them.
I ordered proofs for a variety of different patterns to see what works and what doesn't. The printing itself is very good and close to the original, but I could see that I need to buck up my design ideas! The one that worked best of all was the 'vintage tie' design. Patterns which look the strongest on screen printed the least successfully; Yay! Flowers for example, because the close tones and colour harmonies don't show up so well.
After close critical scrutiny I made a check-list for designs for Spoonflower ...

I selected 6 of the sea-urchins I made last week to work in exactly the same way as I draw the pareidolia images, tracing over the image onto layers above using Procreate's HB6 sketch brush. It was one of those overnight "what if ..." thoughts and I wasn't at all sure how it would look. The idea was to make them more consistent with the pareidolia series drawings. From the first experiment I could see I liked it a lot, the texture and scumbly marks and saturated colours looked good. I like the semi-transparent quality, whichever background I use changes their appearance; but at the moment my favourite is anything dark enough to enhance the chalk-board effect. I am currently working on a pattern which combines little creatures with these roundels.

Today's Instagram post ^

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Sea creatures and birds all in the same place - well, why not. In the combined world of pattern-making and pareidolia these things really don't matter! This new pattern is made from last week's creatures I found in water-stained pavements in the park.

Midweek bonus post - I made a pattern from all the pareidolia creatures I have created so far, set in a cloudy sky.

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

Above left is the original artwork which I like in its own right which became the repeat pattern at the top, on the right is a nice jiggly pattern which happened next which I like because quite by accident it resembles Asanti textiles.
I also experimented with making a couple of colourful geometric artworks with an early Frank Stella feel. They were quick to make and attractive, but I didn't keep them, feeling at this point they were a distraction and lord knows I do enough dotting around.

At the weekend I was browsing 1910-1930s textile designs and came across a lovely little off-cut of fabric from the Weiner Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop) at the weekend. It dated from around 1910 and was tiny, but I was able to reconstruct the pattern from the information that was there. Restoring old patterns or rebuilding them from a snippet is something I absolutely love to do, it's such a great feeling when it suddenly all comes together in repeat. I particularly love this period of design with its simple shapes, stylised natural forms and sombre tones, and being Scottish, the link between Vienna and the 'Glasgow Four' Art Nouveau work is very close to my heart - I grew up at school drawing everything in a hybrid Art Nouveau/1970s style. Pictured below is this weekend's restoration of that tiny scrap of fabric. I found quite a few other pieces from the Wiener Werkstatte, so there will probably be more to come!

​At the beginning of the week I made a textured background for the latest pattern which really activated all the colourways (image below), so simple but effective. I also began work on a page for all my patterns on Redbubble, I will keep adding to that until they are all there. All rainy-day jobs, I even put away the Christmas trees and hoovered, bringing the house out of lockdown mode ahead of a long-awaited family visit. That was hard work, I can tell you.
Then the sun came out with such brilliance at the end of the week all my focus was transferred to outdoors (see my HEW blog if you're interested).

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!