Possibility: Fun with Shapes...

One of the projects I am working on this week involves making geos from 12 different shapes. It's working out to be great fun and I think the hardest part will be narrowing the final collection down to just 12 patterns. 

Here are the shapes, drawn with the pen tool in Illustrator. They're imperfect to give a looser feel to things...

I'm playing around with different combinations of the shapes, rescaling, rotating and recolouring them but not changing the actual proportions. 

 I'm trying to work quickly just placing shapes to explore possibilities and have fun. I like the 2 designs below - I think they would work as placement prints as wall art or on tea towels.

I'm also enjoying layering up the shapes to make more complex motifs...

...and incorporating these into a grid repeat...

I'm finding this to be a really fun exercise and would recommend it if you are feeling a bit stuck for ideas. It really forces you to be creative and playful and start to explore your own style whether that be minimalist, abstract, complex, whatever you are... I'd love to set this as a project for a class of surface pattern designers just to see all the different results!

More on Friday,
Frankie x