From Greeting Cards to Repeating Patterns . . .

Mock Orange and Weigelia Bone China Coffee Mug, Bone China Mugs by helikettle
 

A few days ago, a customer ordered three of the coffee mugs in my Zazzle store. I was over the moon!

I didn’t make a huge amount of money from the sale and it was just one sale among many at this time of year. But it meant an awful lot to me because the three mugs were ones I had created with my repeating floral patterns earlier this year.

So the sale came as a kind of affirmation that I’m on the right track in shifting my main focus away from greeting cards towards pattern making. And as well as that, my own reaction showed me that the bold floral patterns are my first love – which is probably a helpful pointer in determining my ‘signature style’.

Over the course of the past ten years, I’ve gone from Fine Art – my pastel paintings – to greeting cards – to repeating pattern design and I feel I have finally homed in on what I love to create the most.

Wallflowers Birthday Card by helikettle

I do enjoy designing greeting cards but I absolutely love creating patterns! I find it quite addictive – I just wish my technical knowledge could keep up with my enthusiasm!

One of the things I find difficult about creating greeting cards is that I really dislike cards with verse inside, particularly if it is ‘sentimental’. And unfortunately it seems that there are many customers for whom the ‘verse’ is just as important as the artwork.

 

Sunflowers Birthday Card by helikettle
online at Zazzle.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I prefer to let the design do the talking, conveying the sentiments more subtly through the image. And while that suits plenty of people, it also excludes many potential customers for my cards.

To my great relief, there is no ‘verse’ to worry about in Pattern Design! It’s simply a case of putting together shapes, lines and colours in a pleasing way . . .

 

Pretty Scarlet and Yellow Nasturtiums Jumbo Mug by helikettle
 

. . . or is it?

Many years ago, when I first discovered William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement, I read something to the effect that a pattern should always evoke a feeling, recreate an atmosphere, transport the beholder to a place they would like to be. I have searched the internet in vain, trying to find the exact quote. But the gist of it has always stayed with me.

So, in a way, a pattern carries just as much of a message as a greeting card. It just does it in a much more subtle, sometimes almost subliminal, way.

But there’s nothing very subtle about flowers, which I must admit form the basis of most of my designs to date. Most of us love gardens and flowers and in the case of a city flat-dweller, a floral blind or coffee mug may be the nearest they get to a garden on a day-to-day basis. And that provides me with the motivation to keep on working – or, more accurately, playing – with the constantly inspiring ‘source-book’ that Mother Nature provides!

Pretty Spring Primroses Bone China Coffee Mug, Porcelain Mug by helikettle

What feelings do floral patterns (not necessarily mine!) evoke in you?

Designs that look forward to summer!

This is how last week's repeating pattern turned out and although it was a lot of work, I’m really quite pleased with it!

Mock Orange and Weigela Melamine Dinner Plate by helikettle

Once again, I had to spend a lot of time digitally ‘tidying up’ so that the repeats matched up perfectly. I just wish I could work out why, however meticulous I am in my measuring and in spite of taking a lot of care with the painting, I can’t seem to get the pattern repeats to line up exactly with one another first time around.

I think, though, that all the work was worth it and for the first time I succeeded in making a large enough image to cover the whole area of a Messenger Bag in one piece, in spite of warning notices about running low on memory popping up frequently at the bottom of my screen!

Mock Orange and Weigela Messenger Bag by helikettle

I seem to have turned very ‘flowery’ recently but that’s mainly because I’ve set out to design Birthday cards with at least one  for each month’s Birth Flower. 

This weekend I’ve made a start on a Water Lily design, one of the designated Birth Month Flowers for July.

The alternative for July is Larkspur, a lovely cottage-garden flower, that, sadly, refuses to grow in my garden! For years I’ve sown the seeds in the spring but they never even germinate. So this year I’ve given up – though I did think about trying them in a large tub until I realised that the less time I spend in my garden, the better, especially now that my pear tree is in bloom.

This photo was taken a couple of springs ago, before I had so much trouble with the pollen

I still have a lot of work to do on these lilies – the leaves and centres need some detail and then there's the text to add. Sometimes, choosing the font can take me as long as painting the design!

Until I searched for some reference photos, I didn’t realise how complicated and irregular their pattern of petals was!  I would have much preferred to have done one of my rather impressionistic pastel paintings of water lilies, avoiding too much detail. But unfortunately, Monet got there first and I wouldn’t want to appear to be plagiarising!

Once these water lilies are finished, I’m left with just two more Birth Month Flower designs to work on – Poinsettias for December (can’t quite get in the mood yet!) and Morning Glories for September. 

That’s one I’m very much looking forward to! I particularly like bright blue flowers and I succeeded in growing some in a pot last summer by placing the pot on my garden table out of reach of the slugs and snails, who seem to head straight for them at ground level. They didn’t bloom until well into the autumn but by then they made a very welcome, cheerful splash of colour as other flowers faded - and they remained 'glorious' all day, not just in the mornings!

I think the way that Morning Glories grow, twining themselves around anything they can reach, could make for a lovely repeating pattern. But will I be able to come up with a design that can equally well serve as a Birthday Card?

Hmmm. I’ll have to give that one some thought . . 

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