Using Line Work to Improve your Pattern Designs

Using line work details in your pattern designs is a great way to improve them overall and add variety and just make them a lot more interesting to look at. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing some simple ways to add details to your floral and botanical pattern designs to make them go from good to great!

So what do I mean by ‘line work’?

Line work is just that, lines of any kind, any thickness or shape that either goes into the object you’re drawing or outside it i.e the background or ‘ground’ as we call it in pattern design.

You can include any line work you can think of and the more line work details you add, the more interesting your pattern design will be.

So let’s first look at a examples of line work and then look at a pattern design motif with line work and without so we can compare the two.

In the example above, you can see several different types of line work using straight lines, wavy lines, circles, triangles, rectangles, dots, curved lines etc. The idea is to select one or several different types of line work and add them into your pattern background or your pattern motifs. it’s really up to you how you add them and where!

in the example below you can see the red flower at the top which is a simple flower and has no line work in it. The examples below have been recoloured and then some line work added to the main flower head and the leaves. they just look way more interesting and add more variety to your work. You could even use just one motif like this, repeat it many times, recolour it and add some line work details to it and you’d have a great pattern. Not all patterns have to be super detailed and complex to look amazing!

In the example below, you can see how i’ve only added some line detail to the background. the flowers are super simple and have no line work in them at all, yet the background detail adds interest and some contrast to an otherwise simple pattern. All I did was make the line details black and then change the opacity to around 15%.

So there you have it, try out adding some line details to your pattern motifs ands see how much more interesting they become! it doesn’t have to be complex and if you hand drawn them (like I did in the examples above), you can use the ‘Live Trace’ feature in Adobe Illustrator to turn them into vector shapes and then re-use in future designs over and over.

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