A little while ago I set about experimenting with a floral pattern design. It’s always been my hope to break into floral surface pattern design, or to maybe have a wallpaper range or ceramic collection inspired by my experiments with flowers, illustration and paint.
Creating the Floral Fabric Surface Pattern Design
I started with a mixed media painting using a white ranunculus flower styled against a pink watercolour background, chopped it up and put it back together using Illustrator, in order to create something rather more contemporary in design.
From this…
To this…
The Floral Fabric Design
As luck would have it Contrado, an online fabric printing service, recently got in touch with me and asked if I would like to use their website to have my design printed onto a fabric of my choice. Well, how could I say no?!
I’d already created a repeat pattern so had an idea of what it would look like. Contrado sent me a very useful swatch pack first, and being rather new to textile design they also offered some very helpful advice on what fabrics to use for various projects.
At first I was thinking silky underwear, perhaps a cushion, a feminine makeup bag….hmmm my sewing skills aren’t quite up to that just yet. So I decided to create a very simple scarf (which can later be used for other projects once my sewing skills are up to scratch) using Contrado’s man-made Silk Sensation fabric. Silk Sensation is wonderfully luxurious and feels very genuine.
The Contrado service was very easy to use – I literally uploaded the tile, set the repeat pattern I wanted and scaled it down until I was happy. Pressed order and it arrived a couple of days later. Fab!
I’m really happy with my first experiments and importantly I’ve learnt a lot. I lost the detailed lines due to scaling it down too much. Plus I’ve now decided I would rather see a larger, bolder, less uniform design, using my work. I love what I’ve created though and it’s great to see my work used in a new way. Thanks to Contrado for the opportunity too.
And Finally…
It is with quiet excitement that I can tell you I’m now a Not On The High Street partner. My floral watercolour art prints are available to purchase along with some of my illustrations yay!
The reason I say quiet excitment, is because it’s early days and I want to populate my shop, get used to the platform etc etc before shouting about it to the world. But if you would like to a have preview of my fabulous Not On The High Street storefront, please do. The ranunculus watercolour floral art print is now available to purchase as an A4 & A3 print 
You can also ‘Style Your Screen’ and download the contemporary ranunculus floral wallpaper for your tech.
Have an inspired day
Georgie x
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