New: Water Garden!

Jun 4

So glad I’ve finished this new collection—it had been a while! Water Garden is all about koi and pond combinations, with lots of water vegetation and natural movement.

When I went to meet my colleagues in Portland, I showed them what I had been working on. The original design for this collection was a sort of toile de Jouy design, where the viewer can just wander from vignette to vignette. We’ve got a heron, a swan, a kingfisher, some koi, a dragonfly, wild iris, lots of lily pads and floating vegetation along with bull rushes, and a very fat frog.

A Toile de Jouy type water garden design with various pond vignettes

It’s a great repeating pattern—really tricky, actually, but it was so complex and so monochromatic that any accompanying pattern looked out of place. Here are a couple others I tried:

And oh, these patterns were so fussy, too… So my colleagues finally just said, Heather, you’ve got several collections here! Just focus on one! And that’s when I decided to just use the Diamond Koi as my hero, and build up from there. It’s not simple, being a pattern designer, that’s for sure!

I decided to add another koi pattern to reinforce that aspect in a color that was similar to my Toile de Jouy design. I ended up making a bunch of Procreate brushes for the little leaves in the diamond design, so I made some more for the new koi pattern, and then re-used those for the lily pad and dragonfly pattern (the dragonfly was one of my original line drawings, with color added.) I also decided to focus on the water more, so here came the ripples (lordy, that took a while and a million layers), and then I wanted to play around with the grasses and make a more coordinated pattern. Finally, the little duckweed leaves I redrew and placed them on a 5×6 tile so the repeat wasn’t as visible, and then used some watercolory-type brushes for making the “Abstract Reflections” pattern.