June Challenge #12

It hasn't been easy, creating a new pattern every day, but I am enjoying the challenge! Although I put my best effort into each design, inevitably a few will be more successful than others. I was happy to learn that today is National Red Rose Day (found out on Instagram). I thought it was a cool coincidence that my pattern was made up of roses, red roses.

I started by drawing some rough roses with my Pentel brush pen. I am happy that I've been using my brush pens, pencils and felt markers more often in my current work. After scanning these in, I image traced (again!) in Illustrator. They looked pretty good as is so I created the pattern with Illustrator's pattern tool. Image trace tends to work better when you don't need things to look super precise like if you were tracing a drawing of  a face or if you wanted to avoid inking something.

After getting a pattern I liked, I imported it into Photoshop. You can either export the file as a Photoshop file (.psd) or you can cut and paste into a new file in Photoshop. I usually use the second method so I can preserve the vector editability (paste as a smart object).

I adjusted the colors and overlaid a watercolor texture and that's that! I'll have to admit I glossed over a bunch of steps so please don't use this post as a tutorial!

One thing I'll admit is that to make this challenge easier for me to tackle, I revisit pieces I have created or pore over elements I already have created (in Illustrator). I have a lot of fun puzzling things together that may not have originally been created at the same time (sometimes years apart).

Here is a close up: