Spoonflower design challenge: Surface Pattern design with Watercolor Seashells
One of the goals I set for myself this year is to get serious about surface pattern design and create a presence on some of the print on demand sites. Spoonflower a great fabric and wallpaper (and home good) artist focused company. I have used them in the past to print some photos on fabric and their quality is super. They also have a great design challenge program each week where you can see how your patterns compare and resonate with people. I decided to enter their seashell challenge and got to work.
Over the years, seashells are my favorite thing to paint...so my biggest problem was too many ideas
I ended thinking that I should keep a simple color palette and just focus on pattern so this was the painting I started with.
Once I got it scanned and isolated the individual shells in photoshop, I chose these to work with the final pattern:
And then I got to work in Adobe Illustrator trying all sort of options
I ended up with a number I liked:
random placement