Poppy Patch

 Here on the blog I'll try and visit each of the designs in more detail to give those of you who are interested a bit of background as to how it came about and to show you a bit of the 'design process' which is just a fancy shmancy way of describing how I came up with the idea and how it developed!

I adore the design process. Actually, I could easily say that I love it more than the end result which probably sounds a bit weird. It's the bit that gives you the 'OOO's' and 'AHHH's', that exciting feeling of starting with something that really inspires you and then sends you off on a journey of 'what ifs' and 'try thats'. Following me? Well if you've got this far I commend you, my descriptive wording is pretty basic to say the least!

Alrighty - the pretty poppy flower. Such a beauty and if you look really closely, the design details within this flower are amazing. I really am a frustrated botanical artist. I like to pull plants apart and study each of the little features and then draw them. When you press a poppy petal it gets even more papery and fragile and this was the feature which really inspired me to put this pattern together. Collecting and pressing flowers is one of the fondest memories I have as a child and I still love to do it today.  The lines on the petals are so fine and crinkly and the bright orange colour when pressed, turns a lovely faded and worn out antique like colour, a bit like an old antique leather bound book. See the first image of the four below.

So taking these beautiful pressed petals (quite a few of them) I then scanned and photoshopped them to enhance those stunning colours. Next came the watercolour layer to add a bit of that bright orange poppy colour back. And finally, the hand drawn part using a fine pen to create the petal and stem outlines with those beautiful alien like looking centres and stamens. Using all these layers I then 're-built' the flowers putting the new layered petals back one by one. Yes this did take a while!  I used magenta, orange and green highlight colours in illustrator to change the linework, and voila I arranged them all into a repeat pattern. I was super pleased with the result, this new design process of re-building the flowers petal by petal was tedious but well worth the time it took to build up the layers. A whole new type of flower arranging ;)