It’s one of the first cool days today but I’ve been feeling the season coming on for a while. I’ve been looking forward to it with this new surface pattern collection—checked pumpkins meeting crescent moons in colors that feel like October itself.
Creating the Checked Pumpkin Collection
I’m always drawn to pumpkins this time of year for their bountiful sculptural form and the way they signal the shift into the more inward turning side of the year. So, I started playing with combining them with one of my favorite patterns (a simple checkerboard), and they just came to life. I added raggedy crescent moons, flowers, and spider webs, all hand-drawn in Procreate, then arranged them into repeating patterns.
The process is very much trial and error for me. Sometimes the scale is wrong, or the repeat feels too busy, or the colors fight each other, or, most likely for me, there’s a strange bald spot in the pattern. Starting over is just part of the process—it’s where the learning happens.
For this collection, I chose fall colors of orange and gold, but added sharp green as an accent for a little excitement. The mellow gray and grayish orange background was settled early. I feel like it elevates the whole collection and gives it a more sophisticated feel than stark white or traditional fall brown would have.
Where Digital Meets Handmade
This work sits in an interesting space for me as I’ve created digitally for many years alongside making real art in the real world. Every element is hand-drawn, see the little wobble in the lines, the uneven application and texture of the digital brushes. It’s almost uncanny to me sometimes how those marks of a human hand still shine through. But it comes to life digitally, which lets me play with scale and repetition in ways that would be time and labor intensive with traditional media.
It’s analog heart meeting digital possibility, which is at the root of my creative practice: handmade and imperfect, but not being precious or exclusive about the tools that help bring an idea into being.
Art That Lives With You
This collection is so pleasing to me that I’ve ordered myself a table runner with the main pattern! I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks actually being used in daily life, with stains and the way things soften and fade from the wash.
This touches on something that’s been a quiet frustration for me over the years. Surface pattern design and functional textiles are often dismissed as somehow less than “fine art.” As if making something beautiful that you can actually use diminishes its value. It’s called Decorative Art as if there’s a shade over it…
I just can’t accept that! Art that lives on your table, that marks your seasons, that becomes part of your daily life, that’s art outside the velvet rope and far more valuable. Everyone deserves beautiful art in their lives, not just people who can afford gallery pieces. When your tablecloth carries marks of a good meal shared with friends, when the pattern softens from use and washing, it’s not less than. That’s the purpose of art!
Making It Real
If you’re drawn to creating your own patterns and marks, the Wild Creation Guide: Studio Companion Kit includes process videos that walk through my approach to making marks and developing them into finished work.
I’d genuinely love to hear from you – would you like to see this pattern on tableware or something else? What would you use it for? Hit reply and tell me – I read and answer every email.
Shine your light!
Monette
P.S. When the table runner arrives, I’ll share a few photos of it on my own table in the newsletter.