Cactus and Practice

It’s a new week for the Spoonflower design contests!! This week's theme was "Coral, Mint, Black and White" which means that we were limited to those colors in our designs. My design is based off a series of watercolor paintings I did a couple months back.

Here is what my watercolor looked like. I like to start off on paper because it gives me a better flow to my drawings. I have just started out with watercolors, so while I am not an expert, I like to think I am somewhat rocking.From my sketches, I then take pictures. While some people like to scan their sketches, I find that pictures work for me since I am just using the images to trace in Illustrator. If I were using the images as they were, I would want to scan them, and at a high resolution.

Then I just go at them in illustrator. I like to trace as many different drawings, so I can get a lot of variation, sometimes I will even trace the same image multiple times just to see how it varies.Above is an outline view of my files. I love clipping masks, and this is typically how I all the patterns to my shapes.

Arranging and coloring are my favorite part. I like to see how different my combinations I can make just by changing the color and composition. I could seriously spend all day doing this.
 Hope you enjoyed an insight into my design process. Make sure to pop over to Spoonflower and vote for this weeks contest!