Finding The Trees
To create Trees pattern design I used old tree illustrations as a starting point for these designs. I wanted to be able to colour each of the trees differently, meaning a different layer for each tree. I traced the tree illustrations as paths, so that they are now scalable vectors. Meaning I could produce designs with giant trees, which would be great used in a commercial location.
Arranging The Trees
Initial designs had the trees in a row – as shown top. Which perhaps would have worked as a border, but didn’t look remotely like a real woodland with jumbled trees. I simplified the design by reducing the number of trees, then mixed them up to look more like a woodland – as shown middle.
Updated Designs Adding A Glade
Re-visiting the design I felt the tree trunks were too prominent, I needed a simple device to ground them. I created the path of a glade to roughly contain the seven trees. The glade had to be continuous so I altered the shape of each end to make it flow across the design.
Colouring The Pattern Design
There are a lot of different elements to this design; the seven trees, the glade beneath the trees, and the background to the whole pattern. The early designs use fairly natural colour palettes for the trees. It was when I coloured one of the trees lilac, that later designs really began to look interesting. So using compound and clipping paths I could re-colour each of the elements in turn using any of the 39 colours in my swatch library.
Design Progression
I have shown examples from designs H, J and K. Each is distinctly different…
- Design H the trees are coloured individually. Most of them fairly natural colours – except the largest one which I have added lilac to the combination.
- Design J the trees are all white, the colouring comes from the glade and the backgrounds.
- Design K the trees are all coloured the same with colours taken from the 39 colour swatch library. In some instances I have also changed the tint of the colour, or altered the opacity.
Coding The Files
To be able to go back to Illustrator and recreate all the images it is important to code them in a way that can be reproduced. Here my designs are taken from designs H and J. The first code relates to the colour of the largest tree itself, then the colour used for the glade beneath the trees and finally the colour of the background. So for instance H 37 24 38 means the largest tree is colour 37 – lilac. The 24 refers to the glade – this is khaki green. Then 38 for the background which is bright orange. There are some instances where the solid colours were too bright. So some codes look like this H 27 26x60pc 15, where the 26x60pc means colour 26 at 60% opacity. Rolling your mouse over the image should display its code.
Creating This Page
With so many colour combinations it would be impractical to show all of them. Here I have chosen a selection of combinations that I feel are interesting. Smaller screen sizes are designed to display less colour examples. On this page I have shown a small sample of my favourite colour combinations.
The Future
The pattern would be great for wallpaper but also fun for gift-wrapping and fabric too. I would love this design to have another life taken up by a manufacturer. Please contact me if you would like a high resolution file or to talk about how we could work together.
