Motives based on photos. Surface pattern design

            Hello! Thanks for visiting my creative space!

In a last post, I spoke about a morning I went to the Botanical garden in my town and I showed some of the photos taken there. 

I made two patterns using some of those photos, and today I wanted to share my creative process making some Tropical icons. 

I am used to designing botanical and floral motives but I am not used to tropical ones.

I developed four different motives, two types of flowers and two types of leaves. It has been for me  a great experience, as I was trying things till I get  nice motives. I couldn´t tell you the exactly steps I took, as I was just experimenting.

I am showing the motives I created based on the photographs. Of course, I could have used much better photographs but I wanted to use mine. It is a free interpetration.

Anyway, I sharing it with you as I think it is quite inspiring, and it is possible you want to try new motives using this creative process basing on your photos.

I chose the photographs which at first sight gave me an idea of developing a pattern. Then,  I opened them at photoshop and cleaned backgrounds, gave them more contrasts, made image adjustments to my taste, and then I posteorizes it a little. 

I am not an expert at photoshop, just adjusting levels and seeing the results I got what I liked
.

Then, I opened the images at Illustrator and I vectorized them with the live trace tool. The mess is because  I sometimes don´t vectorise them in just black and white but in grays or in colours, which made lots of shapes and colour tones, which made more difficult to work with.

Later, I played with all the tiny elements, deleted some of them, improved others and  coloured them.

At the moment I am working on distributing the motives, sizing them, and trying to make a repeat. 

I hope you like the result! Of course I am going to make more motives, so practising I will get better ones!

I hope you get lots of inspiration and motivation! Have a great weekend!