anika mari

After working hard to finish up a series of four drawings for my sister-in-law before her new baby arrived (incidentally I have four posts waiting to be published about each of the four drawings, but I forgot to get images of the final drawings before I gave them to my sister-in-law! oops!), I decided to start loosely sketching again. I drew a big flower in the middle of the page of my new sketchbook, and thought, “big surprise. you never draw flowers.” Instead of abandoning the page to draw something else, I decided that I’d make a pattern out of it.

I usually just draw to and off the edge of the page, but the shapes and lines always tend to get a little wonky near the edges. I need to practice imagining what the shape looks like, where it is positioned (even if that would be mostly off the page) and how the parts that carry over to the page would be drawn.

Instead of doing that, however, I decided to create a seamlessly tiled pattern. I took the page out of my sketch book, cut the paper into quarters and rearranged it so the edges became the inside. Then I finished the drawing.

You can see how the cuts come together in the center of the image, which were originally the outer edges of the intact piece of paper. I scanned this image in, tiled it in photoshop and then added some gray color to the background. The gray flooded some of the petals, but I like how that looks. A little off, a little unpredictable–adds some interest.

I’m not sure it’s all that obvious in the image above, but the pattern is not perfectly tiled. The edges didn’t quite meet up, but they were close enough, and really I just consider this a sketch anyway.

When working on the next two patterns, I followed the exact same process, and in the end, the tiling was even more off. So much so that it was really obvious that the edges didn’t meet up at all. I put my thinking cap on, and a clear solution hit me. I removed the tape from the paper and rearranged it so that it fit together as the original piece of paper would.

As precise as I tried to be when cutting the lines, I figured they must have been a little off, and if they aren’t perfectly square, it would make sense that it would be harder to tile the pattern. With the pieces back in their original configuration, at least I had the original straight edges to work with. Oddly, it still wasn’t perfect, but it was much better

I worked in similar styles for the two patterns. One pattern has a horizontal composition, and the other is more of a mesh pattern, but both include similar shapes and line quality. After I had the black and white line drawings cropped as accurately as I could, I added some color to each. For the horizontal pattern, I added two tones of a dark red, and for the mesh drawing, I added muted turquoise blues. Then I tiled them to see the result.

I’ve been drawing a lot lately with a focus on precision, so it was fun to work in a looser style. These patterns really evolved as I was working on them, and I didn’t know what i was going to end up with until they were done.

The biggest challenge was getting the tiling to line up well, but I’m not sure computer precision will ever be realistic when working with hand made drawings. However, if I spend a little more time in photoshop, I know I can tweak the lines here and there to get everything to line up perfectly. I’ll try that out when I make my next patterns.