Teacloth!

This is a teacloth pattern, inspired by the biscuits on my desk, and how tea is a very nice beverage. This pattern went through a lot of stages! My whole idea was to have scattered biscuits and tea items on a sheet, the way they should always be shared.

1. First I coloured the items.

2. Then I had to arrange them, which took a lot of bother as my roughs didn’t correspond with Photoshop’s rulers and guides, making very uneven tiles. You can see that I have 2 types; the former items are quite apart from each other, the second I made the items closer together.

3. At this point I knew that green colour was not right, and I began putting down lots of different colours to see how it worked. I chose green to be fresh and cheerful, but it didn’t make the items ‘pop’. So after lots of colour changes (purple - girls playroom, pink - dollhouse, blue - dulls it completely etc.), I settled on the most obvious choice - tea-coloured brown!

4. I had done the wide-spaced tile before developing the close-spaced one, so the negative space did bug me for a while, so I put down a simple tablecloth pattern, something flowery and reminiscent of gardens. It helped to conceal the negative space, but it also adds another layer, making it seem busy. However, when I did the same on the close-knit tile (below), the pattern seemed to bond well.

Here is the final group tile, in all its tea-inspired glory!

I must explain that the reason for the close-spaced and wide-spaced single tiles was me playing around with the aesthetic. I was finishing these up to about midnight, and I realised that when I did tile them in a group of 4, the amount of negative space was quite obvious. So I tucked them a little closer to see the effect, and I do prefer the latter. The biscuits don’t feel so lost, they’re bold and not swimming in a brown sea.