BRABANTIA - creating a pattern

From my research, I decided that I wanted to create a floral pattern. Although this might not necessarily appeal to a male audience, from my research it is evident that Brabantia is mainly targeting females. In general, it is usually the woman who will be purchasing the products, and would be willing to spend a larger amount of money on kitchenware in order to get better quality. A lot of other brands also target women through the use of colour and pattern. 

As Brabantia is only asking for one pattern design, I am not able to show how this design could be used to target a more male audience. Therefore, I will expand on my designs outside of the competition to create a range that appeals to a larger audience. 

In order to experiment with my illustrative techniques, I decided to create something using my new Turner's paints. Each component was painted separately, so that they could be put together to form a pattern once digitised. Colours that complimented each other were used, and a pale blue and greens were used also that it wouldn't completely isolate the male audience. 

These images were then scanned in, using no auto contrast/brightness/tone as I wanted the original colours to be picked up on. The brightness was increased in Photoshop so that the contrast between the paper and the paint was increased, allowing me to pick up on the illustration with the magic wand tool. 

The problem with the magic wand tool is that it doesn't create a very smooth cut out, so I had to refine the edges of each illustration, smoothing them out. 

 I am extremely pleased with how well the paintings scanned, and how the paint lines are still visibile. This is a really interesting way of creating illustration, and is something I will definitely expand on.

Now I had each separate component, I could begin creating a pattern.

Four mini designs were created, simply from looking at the type of shapes that had been painted. The leaves allowed me to create a similar style within each smaller illustration. I think these look really effective, and have allowed me to use all of the different colours, as well as different components including flowers and leaves. These can then be used in some way to create a repeated pattern.

A simple pattern design was created by alternating each smaller illustration. I didn't want to repeat them too much as I didn't want it to become too busy and confusing. This can now be applied to the canister template on the Brabantia website.