My first repeating pattern!

Okay, so I'm a little excited by this. Upon receiving my lovely Print & Pattern book from Amazon yesterday, it dawned on me that I should really try my hand at some repeat pattern making, since a lot of the illustrations and doodles that I've used throughout my work are quite bold and would transfer well as vector shapes. Actually, it's been something I've thought about doing yonks ago, so yesterday was more of a microwave-reminder moment. *PING*

A little google later, and I found a very good tutorial to guide me through the process. The thought of working in Illustrator always fills me with a little dread, but this time I knew I'd just have to give it a go. I'd got numbered steps - what could really go wrong?! (Lots, usually!) I decided I'd use my Vintage Floral motif to have a go at my first pattern:

Well, first up, I did encounter some problems taking my hand-drawn flower illustration from Photoshop, a raster image that had no background, and plonking it into Illustrator. For some reason, even though no background was there, Illustrator insisted on putting a white square behind my flower. I have a little bit of an idea what the reason was now, and eventually, with some fiddling and handy twitter friends' assistance, I managed to fix it. Hurrah! So I was ready to make my pattern, now my flower was a vector and I had my square and my grid etc etc. This is how my tile looked after I'd done with copying and pasting and rotating selected bits of that one flower (oh, and a colour change too):

It took a while to get my head around making sure what overlapped the seam on one side, had to match up to the corresponding side. (In fact, I still have a bit of shuffling to get it just right...)

A few more steps followed on the tutorial later, and I'd got my repeating pattern!


Colour and scale change for a bit of variety:


And I've discovered the lovely "Recolour Artwork" option on Illustrator now, which means I can try out lotsssss of colour variations!

That's about it really - my first repeating pattern - and I can't wait to get started on some more! :-D