Hand Painted Surface Pattern Design: Where My Collections Start

Hand Painted Surface Pattern Design: Where My Collections Start

Every pattern I make starts somewhere you can touch. A painting on the studio table. An ink line on paper. A shape I keep drawing whether I mean to or not.

Then it goes into repeat.

There’s a story we artists sometimes tell about surface pattern design: that it’s a separate trade with a locked door, opened by software skills, trend reports and some special process only a chosen few get to learn. I’ve never quite believed that. My hand comes first, and the repeat is how it travels. Here’s how my hand painted surface pattern design actually gets made, and what holds the collections together.

Two sheets of white paper covered in palette-knife painted teardrop and pod shapes in purple, magenta, yellow, orange and black.
Palette-knife forms on paper. This is where a collection starts.

Two ways in: painted and drawn

My collections come in two lines.

Painted starts on the studio table in real paint. Palette knife, crayon, scraped grounds. Every mark comes off a physical surface and keeps its ridges, rings and scratches on the way into repeat.

Drawn starts with a hand-drawn line, then gets painted digitally. It sits closer to illustration and it’s quicker to color. No tracing, no looking anything up.

Same hand. Same strange forms. Two ways in.

I don’t start with what will sell. I start with what I can’t stop painting. Round forms. Drops on threads. Eyes that show up whether I invite them or not. Pods pushing up through old paint. That’s my visual language, and a pattern is that language said again and again until it fills a wall.

Taking a painting apart

Stirring began as a painting I made a few years ago and never stopped liking: a band of rust with small black trees across the top, and below it a pale scraped ground where painted drops hang on loose crayon threads. None of it is a real raindrop or a real tree. It’s paint that wanted to move.

Mixed media painting with a rust band of small black trees across the top and dark painted drops hanging on loose crayon threads over a pale scraped ground.
Stirring hero pattern: large painted rust and oxblood drops with loose crayon loops tossed across a pale chalk ground.
The Stirring painting, and the hero pattern that came out of it.

So I take it apart. The drops, the crayon loops, the little trees and the ground itself each come off the painting, get isolated and color-corrected, and go back together in repeat.

The scratches stay in. The wobbly threads stay in. The crayon skipping over the grain stays in. That’s where the life is. If I cleaned all of it up, I’d have a pattern anybody could make. I’d rather have one only I could make.

Eyespot goes further. It’s the first collection I built directly from my paintings without redrawing a thing. Somewhere along the way the paint turned into teardrop eyes with lime irises and orange centers, and the eyes, the scraped grounds and the crayon who, what, when and why all came straight off the painted surfaces. An eyespot is the false eye on a moth wing. No creature has eyes quite like these.

Grid of mixed media paintings of teardrop eye shapes in plum and black with lime green irises and orange centers over scraped pale grounds.
Eyespot hero pattern: big and small teardrop eyes with lime irises and orange centers scattered over a scraped chalk ground with yellow crayon marks.
The paintings, and the Eyespot hero pieced straight from them.

Emergence took the long way. I painted those palette-knife forms meaning them to become a print collection. First they became my collage book, Wild Creation: Spring – Emergence. Then they came back around and broke open into repeat. Sometimes the work knows where it’s going before I do.

The drawn line, wobble and all

Groundswell comes out of my Unquiet Ground paintings, where pods and orbs keep pushing up through someone else’s old paint. I draw the bulbs by hand in ink first, then paint them in that same palette: magenta, olive, coral, a little purple, and lime where the shoots break through. The paint runs past the line and stays there. The roots wander off and tangle. I leave all of it, because spring doesn’t start tidy.

Black ink line drawings of bulbs, sprouting pods, wandering roots and small dots on white paper.
Groundswell packed bulbs pattern: overlapping hand-drawn bulbs in coral, pink, olive and lime, outlined in black on a deep plum ground.
The ink drawing comes first. Then the paint, after dark.

The seasonal collections live in this line too: Heavy Bloom, Winter Seedfall and the Checkered Pumpkin Patch & Harvest Moon set. Even my blenders are hand-drawn. Wobbly stripes, wonky dots, a check that doesn’t quite line up. A little uneven, never too much. That “never too much” is most of the skill.

Hand-drawn blender pattern of slightly wobbly black vertical stripes on white.
Hand-drawn blender pattern of uneven black dots scattered on white.
Wobbly stripes and wonky dots. Uneven on purpose.

What makes it a collection

A collection is a set of designs made to live together. One big one does the talking. Quieter ones hold it down.

  • The hero. The fullest version of the idea, elements at varied sizes and groupings.
  • Coordinates. The same elements, smaller or tossed, so they work at a distance or on a sleeve. I usually make the coordinate before the hero; it tells me what the elements can do.
  • Blenders and grounds. Often the painted ground on its own. In Stirring, the deep Oxblood ground is the anchor of the whole collection.
  • Colorways. A light and a dark: Stirring in Chalk and Oxblood, Emergence in Mist and Navy, Groundswell on chalk and deep plum.

Under the hand-made surface, the structure is built to work. My painted collections run as half-drop repeats, and every collection page carries a one-sheet with the designs, the colors and the licensing details on a single page. Each one also has mockups on walls, pillows and folded cloth, because a flat square doesn’t tell you how big a thing is.

Stirring collection one-sheet showing the hero, coordinates, fillers and grounds, the color palette, specifications and product mockups.
Stirring pattern mockups: a throw pillow, a fabric stack, bedding, two wallpapered rooms and swatches in Chalk and Oxblood.
The Stirring one-sheet: every design, the colors and the details on one page. Stirring on a pillow, a bed and two walls.

If you license or buy for fabric, wallpaper, paper goods or home décor, everything on my collections pages is original, made by hand, and available to talk about. If you’re a maker, the same work is printed to order in my Spoonflower shop on fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap.

On the table right now

Two are still in progress, one from each line.

Afterglow is the painted one. That’s its working name. It may stick. It may not. Terracotta and rust with a glow to it, patina greens and ocher for contrast, built from mixed media paintings of round forms. A light ground and a terracotta scribble coordinate are underway. Turquoise rings are drawn and isolated and waiting their turn. Coordinate first, hero later. Same as always.

Hand-painted palette card with swatches of red oxide, yellow ochre, Payne's gray, unbleached titanium, brilliant yellow green and light olive green, clipped over a painting.
Mixed media painting of large round forms in rust, oxblood and ocher with dark outlines over a pale scraped ground.
Afterglow coordinate in progress: loose terracotta crayon scribbles on a warm pale ground.
Afterglow so far: the palette, one of the round-form paintings, and the scribble coordinate.

Overwintering is the drawn one. It starts as black crayon line drawings on plain white paper, which I isolate in Procreate before any color goes in. Same hand-drawn line as everything else in the Drawn line, caught before the paint.

Black crayon line drawings on white paper: two hanging chrysalises, one ridged and one dotted, a heavily scribbled cocoon shape, a budding twig, and loose wavy and spiral lines.
Some of the crayon source drawings for the Overwintering digital paintings.

If you’re waiting for permission

Here’s the part I most want you to hear.

You don’t need a pattern degree, a trend forecast or anyone’s approval to find your visual language. You already have one. It’s the thing you keep painting. The shape that keeps turning up in the margins. The color you reach for before you’ve decided anything.

Repetition is how you find it. Make the thing again, and again, and notice what stays. That’s your voice. A repeat pattern makes it official.

People look to me for permission to stop needing permission. So here it is: you don’t need it. Start with what you’d make anyway, and let it be a little wobbly.

What’s the shape you keep coming back to?

See every collection on my collections page. If you’re a buyer, a licensor, or anyone who wants this work on something, write to me here.

Shine your light!
Monette