It’s been some time since I’ve posted any new patterns! Late last year I realised I’d become a bit burned out on the colouring books that have been my main focus for the last ten(!) years. It certainly doesn’t feel like that long since I started, but it was 2015 that I started to think about making a colouring book, and I published my first title, ‘Geometric Patterns’ later that year! I’ve enjoyed making the books for the most part, but have had a few episodes of burnout along the way, and at the end of 2024 I spent a couple of months not really doing much art, other than a bit of mindlessly colouring my own mandalas. It was a nice break, and towards the end of December I started becoming interested in making patterns again, and decided to revive my mostly dormant Spoonflower shop.
I’ve always enjoyed pattern design, but it’s been more of an occasional thing. This year I’ve decided to make it my main focus, so we’ll see how that goes. This isn’t to say there won’t be any more colouring books, as I would like to make more, but I need a break for a while. I also enjoy creating wall art, and will continue to do that, but for me that kind of art is more personal and I want to keep it as a fun thing that I only post in my shops and on this site if/when I feel like it.
Anyway, this pattern is one of the first new designs I’ve made since getting back into it. It is drawn in a generic folk art style with brown and green flowers and leaves in a diamond motif, using Procreate on my iPad.
Folk Art Flowers Diamond Geometric Pattern in Mocha Mousse
I drew this as an entry for a Spoonflower design challenge – the first time I’ve entered one. Spoonflower runs these challenges every two weeks, with prizes for the top few entries, and the top 100 are promoted on the site. I’m not a competitive person and don’t care about winning, but I’ve realised I like entering these challenges as they’re a good way to get more eyeballs on my work, and can provide some focus when it comes to deciding what to design next. This is something I struggle with a bit, as I want to do all the things and often end up feeling overwhelmed by the directions I could go in. Of course, I’ll only take part in these challenges if the topic interests me, as it would be silly to waste time on a theme I don’t enjoy.
The theme for this challenge was to make a design centered around Pantone’s 2025 Color the Year, Mocha Mousse. The palette was limited to this brown (which you can see in the background of my design) and a small range of related colours from Pantone. Fortunately, tints were allowed, otherwise it would have been very dull and low contrast. As it is, I think it’s still quite a boring colour scheme, but I don’t hate it. Here is my entry on the chair mockup that Spoonflower used for displaying the entries in this challenge (excuse the low quality image):
I only decided to do this challenge two days before the deadline, so I’m quite pleased with how it came out. In future, I’ll try to work more ahead of the deadline, as I don’t like feeling rushed! It placed 559th out of about 1600 entries, so I felt fine about that result.
This folk art pattern is available for sale as fabric, wallpaper and on some home decor products in my Spoonflower store and also on Woven Monkey in the UK.
