Karolful Karolful

Autumn Garden

This is a showcase of two patterns I designed with Kidspattern, for a client’s kidswear collection. I’ve grouped these together as they share a similar neutral palette and both make use of hand-illustrated elements. Additionally, they draw inspiration from nature and bring to mind an early autumn garden, full of flowers, with birds chirping in the bushes. 

If you’d like to learn more about my work with Kidspat­tern please click to vis­it ‘Kidswear Pat­tern Design Archives’ , which dis­cuss­es the his­to­ry and nature of our col­lab­o­ra­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly, fol­low­ing the link to vis­it Kidspat­tern’s Website 

Technique

Both pat­terns were turned into vec­tor graph­ics to ready them for flat print­ing. Ele­ments with tran­si­tion­al shad­ing were bro­ken down into lay­ers of Pan­tone tints, which makes these designs much more cost effec­tive and appro­pri­ate for screen-printing.

All cloth­ing mock­ups pre­sent­ed here are pro­vid­ed cour­tesy of Kidspat­tern and are used for visu­al­i­sa­tion pur­pos­es only.

Retro Bouquet

This flo­ral pat­tern is based on hand-drawn pen­cil illus­tra­tions of bou­quets full of wild, mead­ow flow­ers. It was also inspired by the folksy motifs that are often paint­ed on wood­en coun­try fur­ni­ture, rus­tic ceil­ing beams and kitchen uten­sils. It calls to my mind pressed flow­ers kept in-between the yel­lowed pages of an old diary, as a pre­cious keep­sake of a mem­o­rable day. I’m real­ly enam­oured with this pat­tern’s sen­ti­men­tal and nos­tal­gic feel.

Dur­ing the devel­op­ment of my designs I exper­i­ment with many poten­tial colour and arrange­ment com­bi­na­tions. Here is a selec­tion of three dif­fer­ent versions.

Bouquet Pattern 1

Here is the first ver­sion, which has the bou­quets repeat­ed  in reg­u­lar mod­ules with plen­ty of space in-between the ele­ments. It is visu­alised in a rel­a­tive­ly large size on a creamy dress. I enjoy work­ing in neu­tral and monot­o­ne palettes, which usu­al­ly are suit­able for any sea­son. This sepia set, how­ev­er, makes the flower bou­quets appear as if they’re fad­ed and dried up, mak­ing it even more fit­ting for an autum­nal col­lec­tion. 

Bouquet Pattern 2

In the sec­ond ver­sion of this pat­tern the flo­rals are arranged into vine-like columns, which work as stripes once placed on fab­ric. This arrange­ment accen­tu­ates the folksy under­tones here, dis­play­ing the flow­ers as if they were draped over the per­son wear­ing the t‑shirt. Its dusty, smoke-grey palette also feels nos­tal­gi­cal­ly rem­i­nis­cent of black-and-white pho­tographs, like the kind you can imag­ine buried away in the attic of an old cot­tage. 

Bouquet Pattern 3

Last­ly, the bou­quets are arranged here into a check. This caus­es the print to be much fuller and busier, espe­cial­ly in this small­er size. To con­clude this monot­o­ne trio of pat­terns I recoloured this ver­sion in kha­ki olive green. I feel this works par­tic­u­lar­ly well because it com­pli­ments the rus­tic and home­spun mood one might want to evoke if using this pat­tern specif­i­cal­ly for an ear­ly Autumn Collection.

Bird in a Bush

This design is built up from some hand-paint­ed water­colours of leaves that I pro­duced. They cre­ate a won­der­ful maze of trail­ing vines. In their branch­es I have hid­den some pen­cil out­lines of small, curi­ous birds. I’d like to share two ver­sions of this pat­tern, both of which are intend­ed for cloth­ing for young chil­dren under 18 months.

Selection

The main ver­sion of the ‘Birds on Branch­es’ pat­tern attempts to main­tain the water­colour effect. This was achieved by lay­er­ing flat tints of one Pan­tone on top of anoth­er, cre­at­ing a tran­si­tion sim­i­lar to a true gra­di­ent. The first colour option is a soft warm grey, the sec­ond one is a light olive-green that I chose to visu­alise on a baby dress. For the third we offered the client a flat, sim­pli­fied, sin­gle-colour ver­sion of this pat­tern. This turned out to be a more con­trast­ing solu­tion but it was still kept in neu­tral tones, which meant it was still appro­pri­ate for the younger age groups being aimed at.