Plants with Pants!

Kids Interiors ‘20 Collection
Print + Craft

Concept

For my first foray into pattern design, I created fun, animated plant characters. My adoration for botanicals runs deep. Growing up in coastal Florida, I loved seeing the variety of greenery surrounding me throughout the seasons. Around 2020, I begun collecting houseplants. By inviting plants into my living space, I experienced the lively joy they breathed into my college dorm. This collection connects the plant-themed craft work I had been making at the time with new knowledge of textile design. From a design perspective, this is geared towards childrens interiors.

Craft Exploration

During this time, I had been creating other plant-inspired art. Experimenting with sculptural materials of clay, foam, and biological materials, I formed characters based around botanicals. These youthful characters led me to researching the market around childrens items.

Process

orange you glad?, 2020.
24” x 48”. acrylic, gouache, and ink.

Prior to creating the final collection, I decided to challenge myself to paint a large scale pattern in order to further comprehend the process of manual pattern design. Using cut and folded paper, I arranged a background of intuitively drawn shapes into a background pattern. From there, I sketched posed oranges and layered them on top. After a slight bit of digital manipulation, it was transferred to a large paper with a lightbox. Using gouache, acrylic, and ink, the final orange pattern was created.

Plant Party was created similarly to the previous Orange print, mainly with much more testing involved. During its creation I worked heavily in my sketchbook to experiement with materials, textures, and colors. Color palettes were tested in Photoshop, and color matching the gouache paint took a formulaic precision.