Ivy Leaves Pattern Design
Introducing Ivy Leaves
This pattern is called Ivy Leaves. I noticed the ivy leaves on a wall near to me overlap at the base, which made me think it was a detail to feature in my new pattern.
Mammoth Tracing Task…
I find the only way to create a realistic pattern is to trace lots of leaves. I took lots of reference photos of course. The rescaled, flipped and rotated some of them to create a whole collection of leaves ready to turn into the pattern.
Lighting
I noticed each leaf appeared to be slightly lighter on one side than the other so from the outset the leaves all had to have a left and right hand part.
The first leaves were the obvious natural green colour, one half being darker. I added veining on them all too, then realised it would be another lovely detail to make the veining on the darker side of the leaf darker. So for the completed green version the bright side has white veining and the darker side has a darker greeny-yellow colour.
Choosing Colours Variations
I had initially thought of just varying the colour of the background, but this made the leaves look paper-like on a boring plain background. I then tried recolouring all of the leaves blue! This was a breakthrough as I feel the unrealistic colours are actually more interesting. What do you think?
Brightness
The first designs had quite dark colours which on a large screen looks good, but when used on a phone they looked a bit gloomy. So as well as all the colour variations I have files in three levels of brightness levels saved too.
