Tuesday, June 01, 2010

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.

9 comments:

  1. Very nice! It does evoke that vintage feel. Love the texture, did you create that in Illustrator? (Thanks for the book link btw!)

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  2. Hey Vincent! Wow you really got this pattern thing down! Very cool! I love the quick test one! Nice!

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  3. This is timely... My Painter 11 arrives in a few days and I'm interested in pattern repeat. Do you know about Spoonflower.com with their pattern contests? Fun stuff!

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  4. Thanks for the nice comments everyone. They are appreciated. David - I just found out about Spoonflower.com this past week. It was one of the things that inspired me to try doing a pattern. I'm having some test swatches printed of these to see how they look.

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  5. Susan - sorry, I forgot to answer your question in my above comment. The coloring and textures were created in Painter, but then the whole image was converted to a vector image in Illustrator using the Live Trace option. I think similar textures could be created in Illustrator.

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  6. Great pattern, and it's also great to hear how you achieved it in such detail.

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  7. These are terrific!
    I've never tried it but it sure looks like a lot of fun!

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  8. Very next level, and quite a refreshing approach to this weeks challenge. I often look at patterns and scan for the repeat point, I never imagined that others looked at things this way. Great work!

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