I’ll never pass up a chance to create a flowery design! This week’s sketch uses the same underlying design as Sunday sketches #492 and #493 but is coloured differently to give the impression of big bright flowers.

You can probably spot the similarities (and differences) between this week’s sketch and the previous two related sketches. They all feature an alternating arrangement of two chunky sawtooth star-like blocks: one curvy and one straight.

If I revert back to the theme of last week’s version (which featured a lattice laid over squircles), you can get a better idea of how the sketches are related. Where there were squircles last week, I coloured in the half-circles at the top, bottom and sides to create these fat blooms.

Then it was just a matter of playing around with colour to add and subtract. I’ve used a three-colour palette here to show a bunch (haha see what I did there?) of versions that differ only by colour placement. (Imagine that all parts of the blocks are still there, but when something’s coloured in that green-yellow background colour, it effectively disappears.)

   

   

   

   

I made sooooo many more versions, but you get the idea.

I decided that I liked that last version best, where the internal diamonds in the straight-edged sawtooth stars are in the same colour as the lattice (or what’s left of it). (Really, that colouring makes it hard to see that the straight-edged sawtooth star blocks are there at all.)

   

And since I wanted the big curvy shapes to look like flowers, I recoloured them in a larger palette of warm flowery tones. To maintain the floral theme, I’ve used a dark green for the overlaid shapes.

I did tweak the design a few more times, adding or subtracting, just to make sure that I was happy with my final choice.

   

   

At the very last minute, I made one final change: I removed the dark green shapes around the very outside of the outer flowers. They’re part of the original lattice, but there’s no real need for them to be bordering the flowers around the outside, since they’re not connected to anything else. This is one of those times when I make a rule for myself then break it slightly for design effect!

Removing those dark shapes also has the added benefit of lightening the whole design just a smidge.

This has been a fun design to play with, and I really like the three related sketches that emerged. They’d all be similarly easy to make. I’d probably use templates to cut the chunky shapes. You could probably get away with using print fabrics for the flowers (even floral prints?), although my default is always solids.

The problem with liking all these designs so much is that I won’t be able to decide which one to make, so won’t make any of them 🙂