From Painting to Fabric - How I Design My Colourful Fabrics

I love flowers and plants, and they are the main inspirations for my fabric designs. I find flowers particularly uplifting and joyful, and they never fail to fill me with a sense of wonderment and positivity. All in all, they make me smile and feel happy and this is the feeling I want to evoke with my makeup bags, tote bags, cushions and fabrics.

The Inspiration and Process Behind My Popular Midsummer Floral Fabric Design

●      The Inspiration

Before I get out my paints, I like to put together a mood board of visual ideas and colours to capture the look and feel I want to achieve for the design.

For this floral fabric, I wanted to capture the exuberance and vitality of a garden in full bloom at the height of summer, bursting with colourful flowers and lush green foliage. I wanted to recreate the joy of sitting in a beautiful garden and bringing freshly cut flowers into your home. For my mood boards, I collect pictures from magazines, photocopies from books and brochures, images from Pinterest, photos that I have taken myself and photos of drawings and paintings from my sketchbooks.

●      The Design Process

All of the artwork for my fabrics starts off hand-painted, which allows my distinctive stylised, flat, graphic style to shine through and suits the way I interpret flowers and plants.

This is the most enjoyable part of the whole process, mixing colours, sketching out motifs and applying vibrant paint onto paper. I love painting with acrylics because they are creamy and highly pigmented, but I also like gouache which creates bright, clear effects. For fine details, I use Posca acrylic paint pens.

From Paint on Paper to Colourful Fabric

Whilst participating in BBC One’s ‘Make It At Market’, I was encouraged by my mentor on the programme to put my artwork into repeat patterns. This means creating a design that will seamlessly repeat itself across a large area without any breaks or gaps, to produce a pattern. It was the best advice I received and has allowed me to print my designs onto metres of fabric which can be easily made up into my tote bags, makeup bags and cushions.

I use a combination of producing the repeat by hand and then finishing it off on the computer to clean it up and check that the repeat is seamless. This is the most important part and it’s vital to get right. As my fabrics are very colourful, I use the fabric colour chart from my digital printing company to adjust any colours on the computer to make sure they will print correctly onto the fabric.

The final design is then uploaded to the digital company’s platform, and voila! My pattern is then beautifully printed onto my chosen fabrics using environmentally friendly inks.

My colourful botanical fabrics are then made up into my tote bags, makeup bags and cushions by small manufacturers in the UK, to be enjoyed by people who love colour and pattern as much as I do.

Adding Some Colour and Pattern to Your Life

If you’d like to purchase some colourful products that can be used and enjoyed everyday, you can see my whole collection here. Whether it’s a new tote bag to carry your day-to-day essentials or a storage basket to cover up a plain plant pot, there’s something for everyone. You can buy metres of fabric, so you can get creative and use my hand-painted patterns for domestic upholstery to cover a chair, footstool or headboard to create a statement piece of furniture or for soft furnishings like curtains and blinds.

If you want to receive updates on new designs and new products that I’m working on or just behind the scenes of my design business, sign up for my email subscribers newsletter.