I began working with the mushrooms and found that they were very fun to work with and I kept just finding other ideas to work with. I explored texture with the mushrooms, particularly the kind of weird uneven patterns on the top, and some that were spotted, and this was something I knew I wanted to work more with this.
I wanted to make these quite bright and fun patterns and experimented a lot with scales and colourways, backing textures and motif sizes. I had a lot of fun with these and just carried on finding new little things to do and I wanted to give myself a lot of choice because these will probably only represent one or two patterns out of the whole 30 part collection. Although like my Spoonflower collections, I only need to make one pattern but giving myself that little challenge of going further and creating a whole little set from it is good practice for me. I also want to set a lot of time apart to edit my collection and really decide what I want for the best possible combination and representation of my work.
I also created a set of blenders, using the textures that I was taking from the mushrooms in a number of different colourways and combinations within this. I quite enjoyed doing these too as I think they do look pretty and I could picture them working well with other designs.
Finally I printed these out to check the colours because my laptop looks so so different than printed or even my ipad. I think this is important to make sure I like the colours. I considered that my greens are a little bright, but I know I also liked muted colours, and I have been surprising myself lately with brighter colours and how much I actually like them.
I printed them out and had quite the collection here of blenders, secondaries and a couple of possible heroes for the mushrooms. I think it would depend on where I wanted the mushrooms to be represented in the collection as to what kind of pattern I will use from these sets eventually, or whether I develop even more from these.
I wanted to explore colourways a lot and these show a few examples of this, just showing some of the main background colours changing and how they look with each one and seeing how the colours work together. Sometimes I would change the colours of the dots or squiggles too but primarily I used these to add some contrast back into the work too, so a green background pattern with yellow and green mushrooms would have pink dots.
I also experimented with different backgrounds by trying different sizes of dots and squiggles, looking at regular repeats and seeing what these looked like, I do not like the ones with the even repeats behind them as I think they just look textured. I prefer the uneven dots that I add in myself with even pattern, the same with the little squiggles.
Lastly, the main experiment was scale where I went from the actual tile I used to make the seamless repeat, then a large scale repeat and a smaller scale repeat. I think these worked well actually in the different scales. If I had to choose what scale to use to put it on something maybe like a small pencil case I would probably use the middle one for wanting to see the different motifs. But I do think the bottom one would work too as more of a coloured pattern to look busier.
Tahlia Paige 