Illustration Friday - Slither

I've always had an interest in patterns - everything from vintage fabrics and wallpapers to contemporary wrapping papers, fascinates me.  I particularly love patterns where you need to look hard to find the repeat. I recently purchased a book from Taschen publishers titled Decorative Art 50s and I've been pouring over the section on textiles and wallpapers studying the various depictions of mid-century modern fabrics.  


When I learned that this week's word for "Illustration Friday," was 'Slither,' I decided to try and do something different - I would attempt to interpret the word by creating a pattern. After some initial trial and error I finally discovered that in Corel Painter, by going to the Pattern palette and selecting 'Define Pattern,' the program would tile what ever it was that I was drawing. For example - any shape that I drew that ran off of the bottom edge, would reappear in the appropriate spot at the top edge so that the image would automatically be lined up for tiling (I still had trouble getting Painter to save my patterns, but that's another story). After creating a few sketches, I would save these as tiff files and then place them in an Adobe Illustrator file where after transforming them into vector shapes (using the 'Live Trace' option) they could easily be turned into pattern swatches that could be used for filling shapes.  I still have some problems with seams showing, but that's a problem I'm sure I can figure out.  Anyway, I did a few different designs using snakes (to go with the 'slither' theme) and here are my favorites.

First, here is one of the original digital pencil sketches.

Next, is a quick test in Illustrator to see how the elements look in a pattern fill. I was really happy with the way this looked because I felt that the repeat wasn't too obvious.

Here is a colored version, where for some reason, the repeat is more noticeable - you can see a grid formation formed by each element block.

Here are a couple of other experiments that I did, also using snakes as a motif.