I don’t have an earth-shattering artistic venture to share with you all today, but I do have a little fun thing (at least I think it is!).
So, I find Skillshare pretty interesting, like many do. If you’re unaware of what Skillshare is (aka if you haven’t ever seen a sponsored YouTube video before), it’s basically an online learning subscription that has tons of videos in genres ranging from artistic avenues, entrepreneurship, food, technology, and more. The art classes have always been what caught my attention the most, unsurprisingly.
One pretty simple class that has always interested me in particular is how to create a repeating pattern (this class is actually available as a free tutorial article here). I don’t know what it is about it, but something about a repeating pattern is so cool to me! Perhaps because the way it’s done in this class is not something you can do solely in traditional art. You have to have a computer program of some kind to actualize your pattern.
I didn’t consider this when I first made my base pattern.
I do not have any kind of computer program, so I was a bit stuck after I finished the initial product. But we’ll get there in a moment.
My inspiration was spring! I am so (weirdly) excited about spring coming (I put “weirdly” in parenthesis there because winter is actually my favorite season and spring is far and away my least favorite. I think a lot of the excitement comes from the return of baseball!).
Because of my enthusiasm, and because I would need a lot of doodles to fill the page — I probably should have worked smaller for my first go around — I chose spring. I felt like I could come up with lots of little drawings based around the idea of the season. I was especially excited to draw some bumblebees!!
(If you are a proud owner of one of my zines, you’ll note the bumblebee stamp on the back. I’ve shown it in another blog post, but this stamp has kind of become my signature on art I give to other people)
Once I had completed this, I sat back a realized I was at a bit of an impasse. I had no way of manipulating this piece digitally to make it actually repeat. So, I posted it on my artstagram and figured I would go about looking for a method of achieving my dreams of repeating this damn pattern.
Luckily for me, my friend Marisol — swordsandink on Instagram. Check out her incredible brush lettering on her account — immediately offered her assistance. We met up for lunch and I gave her my original and within hours, she had sent me a cleaned up scan of my original and the repeated pattern that she had whipped up on her iPad Pro.
Therefore, it is with the most grateful heart that I say thank you Marisol! Because of her sick technological skillz that I can present the repeated pattern to you all!
It isn’t perfect because my initial cuts weren’t made exactly in the middle of my piece. My excitement made me forget to measure thrice, cut once. But it’s a start! And everyone must start somewhere. I’m happy with my first shot at this technique. I do plan on trying this again. I’ll keep you guys updated on my subsequent attempts.
fakestginger 