Last month I dived into abstract texture pattern making. You can make texture patterns by using photos that capture any kind of texture. If you look around you will see textures everywhere. In this blog post I want to tell you a little bit about my process of creating abstract texture patterns.
Lots of floors have great textures but you can also find them in nature; trees obviously but also grass or leafs, the sky. Even under the shower I see textures and potential patterns! For these abstract texture patterns I have used photos of leafs, cement and tree bark. You can see some examples below.
Textures to make abstract patterns
I also use brushes made out of textures of paper, dirt, ink etc. There are endless possibilities to experiment with!
What I love about the abstract texture pattern making process is the making it seamless process: removing the lines with the offset and stamp tool in Photoshop.
Photoshop is a great program if you are working with abstract textures. It has a lot of nice features, the only thing I miss are the artboards, which are great in Illustrator.
A lot of the abstract texture designs can afterwards be vectorised in Illustrator, so the design will be made out of vectors, which means that you can stretch the design. In Photoshop you are stuck with the size that you chose before you began.
For the abstract patterns made out of brush textures I usually start with a large canvas. Most brushes can go up to 2500 pixels, so I usually use a canvas of 5000 pixels. My first marble pattern in dark blue and blush hues and the variation in green hues was also made using these kind of brushes. Turning these into vectors doesn’t really work well, so the initial design should be large enough to be printed on a variation of products.
In this post I show you the abstract texture patterns that I have been working on within the last month. I love everyone of them! It is not always easy to picture them on products though, so I made two kind of mood boards/mock-up boards to make it easier to see where these abstract texture patterns could be used for. Any comments are welcome below!
Abstract texture patterns on apparel
Abstract texture patterns on beachwear
