Painting Patterns

How I added a wall pattern and fabric patterns in paintings.

I love to add patterns in my paintings. I love them on clothes, walls, floors, furniture- nearly everything. Someday I’m going to create a painting that is so full of patterns it is challenging to discern the people and objects. That would make Vuillard the master of patterns proud. Depending on your painting style adding patterns can be challenging. For me I tend to favor accurate drawing so often need some kind of system for making sure my patterns look fairly consistent. One thing I do forgive is accurate perspective. I will often place a flat pattern on an object drawn in perspective which has the effect of flattening a form. Interestingly I don’t find this decision to look odd even though a nerd type could definitely see the inaccuracy. But when it comes to patterns I embrace the fact that I’m more into the visual appeal and less into 100 percent accuracy. Still part of looking good means a certain regularity in proportions and line work (at least for many of my paintings) and hence a method to ensure this.

In a recent painting I wished to create a wall paper pattern. I wanted the motifs of the wall paper to be well drawn and spaced regularly. I selected a photo having a pattern I thought would be pleasing and using photoshop I painstakingly removed the background with the eraser tool. I now had a swatch with just my pattern.

For this painting I made a paint study and loaded it into photoshop as well. Here is where I can map out my wall paper. I copied and pasted my swatch into my study creating a separate layer and adjusted it so the motifs were nicely proportioned on the wall. I then replicated the pattern via copy and paste growing it into the size I needed to cover my wall. I trimmed around objects with the eraser tool and merged all layers together leaving me with just one wallpaper layer. Next I cleaned up the image using the eraser tool and the paint brush tool. As I wanted my motif to be a lighter value than the wall I painted on top the motifs using my chosen color in Photoshop.

Below is the final effect. You can see I also added a pattern to the chairs and a tile floor. For the chairs I followed the same method as for my wall. I shall cover the tile floor in a separate newsletter.

Now I have an image I can refer to for my painting. To transfer this to my wall I got out a fresh sheet of tracing paper and taped it onto my painting. Then I made a single motif on my tracing paper matching the proportions in my study. Measuring my motif with a ruler I worked down a vertical column drawing dots for the top, bottom, and sides of the diamonds keeping the spacing above and below equal. I had to do this a few times to get the size of the motif in my painting to match that in my study. Once achieved I drew a grid making lines across the top, bottom, down left and right and through the middle vertically and horizontally where the next diamonds would go. I drew dots for every diamond marking the top, bottom and sides. I then penciled in the diamonds. (Note I elected to remove motifs which would occur in the middle of four surrounding diamonds as I thought that would be too busy.)

After this I put transfer paper between my tracing paper and my painting and proceeded to transfer just the dots. (I use Saral transfer paper which comes in four colors.)

Now the diamonds are all marked out . I painted them by making little lines connecting the dots and free handing the lines inside each diamond. I mixed up the color I decided on for the motifs. I used only one color in one value for this.

Below is the painting with the wallpaper pattern completed. The seat pattern and tile floor shown in the study remains to be done. (Again I used this same technique for the seat pattern.) One thing to note is though all of this work seems lengthy and tedious it actually isn’t that bad as things are repetitive. Also the time spent is well worth the results.

I wish to share another technique I use when making patterns this time for clothing fabric. This involves making a stencil. I had a pair of pants I wished to put a bunny pattern on. I again had chosen a photo of a fabric swatch I liked and as the background of my swatch matched the color and value of the pants I used it unaltered.

Digital stuff. I loaded it in my photoshop reference as a separate layer, sized it so the motifs fit nicely and replicated it until it covered the pants. Then I merged all the layers into one single bunny pattern layer. Now you can erase out any excess around the edges of the pants but Photoshop has a nice feature allowing one layer to be bound by the shape within another layer. In this case I used the smart selection tool to select the pants and copy/pasted it to make a separate “pants” layer and forced the bunny pattern layer to be bound to it. (For those who don’t use Photoshop you can skip all this digital stuff.)

Next I taped on some tracing paper over the pants on my painting and did a drawing of the two bunny motifs in my pattern. This was to get a good proportion. Then I drew these motifs onto an index card, cut them out with an exacto knife and cut them into a strip I could easily use as a stencil.

When painting the pattern onto the pants I positioned each stencil by referencing my fabric swatch as a guide. And I just painted on it. This went quite quickly and is very worth the effort.

Below is the result along with two other gals. You’ll see there is a bit more design to the pants and that I did by freehand.

Notice the gal’s sweater on the right. I made a stencil for that motif as well. I drew about four in a vertical column on an index card and cut them all out. Then just positioned them onto the painting and painted them in. The pattern on the shirt at left was done by freehand as were her pants.

I hope this helps some of you who care to make reasonably accurate patterns in their paintings. There is also the technique of just freehanding everything and frankly if I ever do create a painting where there are patterns everywhere I would likely go this way.

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Folks if you are interested in purchasing or seeing more of my work please visit my website at www.brandyagun.com.

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