In the brick and mortar world, I have been asked several times about how my images come to existence so I decided to unashamedly assume you would like to hear about it as well. This is how the process unfolds…
In all fairness, each image has its own story and a different set of steps until its conclusion but some of these steps are often shared among them, so with such focus in mind let me tell you about how I created the "Mosaic Forest" seamless pattern.
Nature is a recurrent theme in my work thus making nature photography an important source of reference and inspiration to me. Most often I refer to pictures for their color palette, not this time though… This time around I resorted to nao’s most excellent portfolio on Flickr, in particular a set of pictures featuring some exuberant rounded bushes (if you know how they are called or where they grow, please, feel free to jump in). I simply couldn’t take the harmonic rounded shapes and undulating gradients out of my head and so, armed with the poetic license of a non-realistic style, I went right to work.
I drew the pattern entirely by hand on 5 sheets of tracing paper using a marker, alternating their stacking order randomly. In so doing I managed to draw in layers which later would help making the transition from paper to digital canvas way smoother. As most things in digital design, there
are always several ways of achieving the same result but scanning those 5 drawings separately instantaneously generated an interesting combination of grouped elements to be color manipulated with greater freedom and efficiency inside Adobe Illustrator.
Next in line was making the pattern seamless, a mathematical game which gets pretty visual after a while. A pattern, as the word implies, will always land a geometrical shape. Still… I always try to make my patterns the most organic possible. After I’m done with that, comes the real fun… coloring! It is impressive how a different color way can transform an image. At the same time, it becomes so easy to turn a beautiful image into a piece of junk, by simply not picking the right combination for the color palette. This is true not only in regards to Color Theory but also commercially. Several of my images are sold in different color ways and very often the same client purchases the exact same image in all their color gamut. It is not because the clients don’t know how to manipulate colors in a vector program, trust me, it’s because they understand how difficult it can be to group them properly.
And so we got to our final destination. You may now depart (but not without first clicking on the patterns to see them in a repeat… it’s worth it!). I’ll see you in the next trip.
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[...] few days ago on "Mosaic Forest" and "The Stationery Position" posts I briefly touched two especially important topics for [...]