Karolful Karolful

Night Forest

The pattern’s concept comes from imagining a forest at night that is full of blooming flowers, enveloped in billowing foliage, and spotted with small button mushrooms and climbing vines. The colour palette was composed by Kidspattern and comprises dark navy, warm brown, vibrant red, with notes of blush pink and off-white for balance. The composition and aesthetics are inspired by the work of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement.

Below is the main ver­sion of the “Night For­est“ pat­tern. It was select­ed by the client to go into pro­duc­tion as part of their Girl’s Autumn-Win­ter Col­lec­tion, which I helped devel­op with @kidspattern. The care­ful­ly designed mod­ule was intend­ed for a dark back­ground, made full use of the colour palette and, once repeat­ed, it cre­at­ed a rich and ornate full-print pattern.

This project was a part of my ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Kidspat­tern. If you’d like to learn more about them please vis­it their web­site HERE. Alter­na­tive­ly, view the archive of our pre­vi­ous projects HERE, in which I dis­cuss in detail the his­to­ry and nature of our work.

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

Break it Down

To cre­ate a base for the repeat pat­tern mod­ule I dig­i­tal­ly hand drew all the com­pos­ing ele­ments, lay­ered the colours by using each for a spe­cif­ic ele­ment and then inter­wove them togeth­er. To be evoca­tive of a set­ting fit for a mys­te­ri­ous fairy­tale I also pep­pered the dark-blue back­ground with white, star-like, dots. Last­ly I sym­met­ri­cal­ly reflect­ed the design to cre­ate the com­plete mod­ule. Below you can swipe right to view exam­ples of this pat­tern in print. 

Creative Exploration

Please feel free to browse through the alter­na­tive arrange­ments and colour solu­tions below. This selec­tion depicts some of the explo­rative steps that went into devel­op­ing this pat­tern, and which I go through in every design process. For each pat­tern I’ve attached a descrip­tion, var­i­ous siz­ings and close-ups.  

Version 1

Com­pared to the final ver­sion of the Night Gar­den pat­tern this ver­sion uses a more lim­it­ed and win­tery colour palette. It reduces the total amount of colours used to just two, which makes it more cost-effec­tive. For this high­ly detailed ver­sion I’ve invert­ed the colour of the star-like veil of dots (from white to blue), which I think livens up the white back­ground. 

Version 2

This exper­i­men­tal ver­sion is more com­plex and intri­cate and was cre­at­ed by using the base ele­ments to cre­ate mir­rored reflec­tions. The result is this tiled pat­tern, which moves away from the ini­tial­ly very organ­ic imagery and instead is more delib­er­ate­ly orna­men­tal in its struc­ture. With the back­ground colour set to brown it still uses the full array of the colour palette but with dif­fer­ent tones now dom­i­nat­ing. 

Version 3

This vari­a­tion makes use of the orig­i­nal pat­tern arrange­ment but presents it in a sim­pli­fied, mono­chrome colour palette. Here I sim­ply jux­ta­pose a vibrant red with a com­pli­ment­ing blush. This colour­ing made it a good option for some of the specif­i­cal­ly fes­tive cloth­ing in the clien­t’s Win­ter Col­lec­tion. 

Version 4

I kept exper­i­ment­ing with the ‘mosa­ic tile’ vari­ant of the Night Gar­den pat­tern and end­ed up cre­at­ing this rather flam­boy­ant and elab­o­rate option. To coun­ter­bal­ance the grow­ing lev­el of detail­ing here I’ve pre­sent­ed it in a more mut­ed ver­sion of the colour palette. I’ve also enlarged the over­all size of each tile.  The kalei­do­scop­ic qual­i­ty is mes­meris­ing and I’m very pleased with this addi­tion to the set. This is not how I orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed the mod­ule to look but it is very sat­is­fy­ing when the cre­ative process takes on a life of its’ own like this and leads you to some­thing nov­el — par­tic­u­lar­ly when the out­come is so unex­pect­ed and intriguing!