For the past two weeks I've been doing coursework on "Collaboration for Pattern Designers" over at Pattern Observer. The class is free with the Textile Design Lab membership.

The final project was to upload a couple of motifs and then to choose a motif of another designer and use those to develop a pattern.

Since I seldom use line drawings, and wanted to stretch in a new direction I chose this motif by Esther Jongste.

As I started playing around in Illustrator I think I was subconsciously influenced by my recent thining about the tribal trend (which interestingly I abandoned because I couldn't come up with anything I liked at all.) I've been wanting to come up with a texture that gives prints a hand-stamped feeling so played around with different textures. Interestingly, there is nothing of the line drawing image that initially drew me to this motif.

Carlyn Clark's first attempt at a collaborative print using Esther Jongste's motif

For my second attempt I committed to retaining the hand drawn feeling. I seldom work in black and white so this was a nice departure. And I ended up really liking the diagonals formed by the leaves as the motifs were flipped.

Carlyn Clark's second attempt at a collaborative print using Esther Jongste's motif

For my third try I decided to color in the drawing and try to come up with something that really stayed true to the original illustration.

Carlyn Clark's third attempt at a collaborative print using Esther Jongste's motif

In the end I really enjoyed this process. Working with someone else's motif gets you thinking in new and different ways. Just by looking at Esther's Illustrator file I was able to see and learn from the process she used to develop the motif. I love her strong lines and whimsical sensibility. All in all it was a fun process and I enjoyed playing around and doing work just to be doing work and not having any end product in mind. Thanks Esther!