Exploring repeating patterns - I've been 'guest blogging'!

As a child I was fascinated by repeating patterns on wallpapers, wrapping paper and fabric. I spent hours trying to find where each one started and stopped and trying to workout what sort of weird shape was being used to make the seamless tessellation. I was in awe of the creativity and wizardry that made it happen. 
My curiosity never really abated and being part of the wonderful 52 Week illustration challenge on facebook has spurred me into action. 

I have written a full tutorial for the #illo52weeks challenge website - it's quite long, but I hope will inspire others to get pattern making. 
  
You can read it here: full tutorial

Here's a walkthrough of my latest pattern: 

The prompt for the challenge was 'swimming'. I  decided that an underwater scene would work well. I dithered about the subject and decided firmly on using Koi. However as you can see, I got distracted by mermaids!
I scrolled through story books and stock images, and made a series of sketches (I also made sketches of fish to swim with the mermaids, but I had a word with myself).
I used them as a basis for my ink - a brush pen. Taking photos of the pencil work meant I felt freer with my brush strokes. If it had all gone pear-shaped I could have used the photos as a guide for digital drawing.
As it goes, I wasn't too unhappy with it, even though the characters of the mermaids changed a little.






































Pencil lines were erased and the ink drawings were scanned, cropped, layered, flipped and coloured. Backgrounds came and went. The repeats were swapped around to be checked, tweaked, swapped and checked again.



Finally I committed to a pattern template - which I found fault with straight away. I could endlessly make adjustments and it pains me to see things that aren't quite right - but it is a time pit!

So here is the pattern template and the pattern repeated one and half times:



It is available on t-shirts, large silk scarves, duvet covers and a whole a bunch of other stuff in MY REDBUBBLE STORE

A drawing a day 2014 - January

More drawing a days can be found on a new blog - it's getting a bit crowded in here!
Katharine's A Drawing A Day (KatsADAD)

Day 2
Legs and feet / Rewan 
Stick and ink, sketch pad
10 minutes and 5 minutes

Day 1
Knitted Christmas tree
Pen, sketch book
20 minutes

Pre-amble 2: 

31st December 2013

Rain water splash - from a photograph.

Pen in sketch book, 2nd attempt. 20 mins.

Pre-amble

30th December 2013

Pen in small sketch book, 10 minutes

Sleep

My 6 year old daughter sleeping at her grandparents.

I was learning to look for longer than than I was drawing by now and a style is emerging.

More practice needed to get the features in proportion but we're getting there.

Ink pen

Feb 2007

Duloe Mantlepiece

This is one of my first ink pen sketches.

My parents have a more interesting mantlepiece than I do.

Feb 2007

Covert Sketch

This is a quick sketch I did covertly while in a meeting (on the corner of my agenda) while one person took longer than most would to make his point.

Ink pen on copier paper!

March 2006

Morning Hug

This is an ACEO / ATC watercolour and ink sketch(done very quickly) on cartridge paper designed for Mothering Sunday 2006 and sold on ebay.

Boxmoor CC

What else is there to do during a cricket match? Even in cricket the players move too fast for this very slow technique to capture, so this must be the tea break. Black ink pen on cartridge paper, A6 July 2007