All my designs do truly start in my sketchbook. 

I’d love to describe how I sketch sat in an idyllic, perfectly lit studio in the middle of the countryside with floor-to-ceiling windows and nature all around me.  But the truth is that more often than not it’s an evening (after my daughters are in bed) and I’m sat on my sofa with the TV on in the background.  

That is where I do my best doodling, and where those doodles turn into ideas for ‘proper’ sketches. 

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Sketching can sometimes be really quick, and other times it takes lots of refining, and depending on how detailed I’m going it’ll either continue in my sketchbook, or I’ll start working it up on my iPad where I draw directly onto the tablet.  Because I change the scale of my work so much across products, all my sketches do eventually turn digital somewhere in the process and 90% of the time they’ll become vector illustrations, which put simply means I can play with the shapes and scale without losing any of the details.  There are times, however, when I don’t turn them into vector illustrations, and instead I work with scanned-in versions so I can keep the clear brush-strokes or texture from what I’ve done by hand. 

Each sketch often becomes a single motif, or element that will be included in my patterns and once they are all digital I start to construct my patterns.  The best way to describe it is imagine you were building a lego model, but instead of bricks I use motifs.  Motif by motif I’ll piece them together to get the effect I want for the pattern and over time I’ll play around with scale, colour and textures to get it to where I imagined it would go in my head. 

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Once I’ve got a square filled with my repeat pattern (and yes, fundamentally all my patterns are square) I then consider which stationery items I want to apply them to, or which motifs I want to pull out and use.  It’s not possible to put every pattern on every item, both for cost and space on the stock shelves, so I’ll think about what’s sold well, where there might be gaps but first and foremost was there anything I’ve needed that this would do the job for? 

Getting the pattern right for whatever format of stationery can take a lot of tweaking, but eventually it’ll be a print-ready file to do a test print of and then ultimately send to my manufacturers for them to turned into my products.  And nothing (except maybe a wonderful customer review) beats the feeling of opening the boxes of new arrivals and getting to feel them in my hands for the first time.  It really never gets old!