Design Process for Fairytale Pink Village Houses Pattern Using Watercolor and Photoshop
Mockup by alexandercho / Freepik
The Fairytale Pink Village Houses design started as a client project. My client gave me inspirational pictures and a general colour scheme. However, after some back-and-forth communication, I ended up submitting a different design and keeping this one for my licensing portfolio and Spoonflower shop.
Before I begin designing this pattern, I want to share my thoughts on designing patterns using Photoshop or Illustrator.
In short, if I want to create a pattern using complicated watercolour motifs, I would choose Photoshop. Of course, I could vectorize the watercolour work and simplify the gradient in Illustrator, but I would lose the original texture created with translucent paint on watercolour paper. If I want to make a pattern made of illustrative motifs with lines and shapes, I would choose Illustrator. Can I add texture in my design with Illustrator? Absolutely. There are many ways to create vector textures.
I’m planning on writing another blog post going into detail on this subject:
Surface Pattern Design Software Compared: Photoshop, Illustrator or Procreate? Let me know in the comments if you are interested in this topic, and sign up for my newsletter for the updates!
For the Fairytale Pink Village Houses pattern, I decided to paint the motifs with watercolour on paper and use Photoshop to preserve the original texture. Here are the steps to create this pattern and most of my watercolour patterns :
Sketch the thumbnail of the pattern layout.
Create a new document slightly smaller than A3 size and 300 dpi in Photoshop. Turn on Pattern Preview, and draw the pattern layout inside the document. Tweak it to my liking.
Define the pattern (at this stage, it’s just the sketch), lower the capacity to about 5%, and print out the pattern plan on size A3 watercolour paper.
Paint each motif with watercolour directly on the printed pattern plan.
If you have a background layer for your design, print another pattern plan on the same size watercolour paper and paint the background to make sure the foreground motifs and background have no overlapping.
Scan the painting with 300 dpi.
Clean the paper background, separate the motifs on its layer and turn each layer into a Smart Object.
Copy and paste all motifs onto the pattern plan document and arrange each element according to the plan.
Make any necessary final edits.
Et voila! You have your cute watercolour pattern.
Do a happy dance!
Mockup by Victoria
Mockup by Creatsy
Mockup by Aimée
Pro tips:
The pattern planning stage in Pattern Preview is super helpful. It helps me decide what motifs to create and how many versions of them I need, which saves me a lot of time and confusion in the later stage of the design process. If you’ve never done it before, I highly recommend it! Please comment below or email me if you have any questions about that. I can share more details in the future. Don’t forget to sign up for my email list to learn more about surface pattern design for free! :)