Color and Pattern: 50 Playful Exercises for Exploring Pattern Design

by Khristian Howell

The importance and prevalence of both color and pattern in the current design landscape is impossible to deny. Not only is pattern a headliner in the fashion category, but bold pattern is also taking center stage in home decor, paper goods, and accessories like no other time in recent history.

It's time to jump onto the scene with Color + Pattern! Masterful pattern designer Khristian A. Howell will fill you with confidence and a fearless use of color and an interest in all things pattern, so you can create your own beautiful art that can be printed on fabrics, paper, and transfers.

Fully illustrated with a large and varied range of pattern designs, Color + Pattern highlights leaders in the industry, showcasing how pattern design comes to life when it finds its way onto perfectly paired products. Aside from sharing loads of gorgeous work, Color + Pattern informs readers on the many different kinds of patterns and terminology, exploring found patterns, sharing processes of creating patterns, as well as showing ways to integrate pattern into many facets of real life with 50 exercises.

After all color and pattern are meant to be fun, so design, color and repeat!

Genres: Art, Reference, Nonfiction, Design, Crafts

176 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 2015

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some great pattern ideas for surface decoration in this book. It also highlights some pattern artists whose blogs I then bookmarked for later reference. Though I did not do the actual exercises throughout the book, if I had time, I think these would be helpful. I did discover Jessica Swift and her pattern courses though, which are online and look great. I'm obsessed with the large-scale print exercise and the example design. It's a cream-colored background with black bars of various sizes and placements with a large cluster of flowers on top. The graphical quality of this pattern is fabulous and I did my own interpretation of this on some of my mugs. This was a great library browsing find!

[Laurie Fieldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun and inspirational book to jump-start your creativity featuring interviews with successful designer/artists. The author is hilariously in love with color, color, color, color (and pattern and design) :))

She shares how she gets inspired and some of her favorite tools: breakout your moleskin with your favorite pens and pencils for sketching and doodling, travel (local, too), gather fabric swatches, take your own photographs, tear sheets from magazines and use with an oversized cork/magnetic board, create public and private Pinterest boards, and helpful Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop how-tos, as well.

A quick read, but I took my time to absorb as much ingenuity and imagination as possible.

Highly recommended!

[Am Y · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some useful and fun exercises to try in the first part of the book, but the second part got a bit shoddy. For instance, to illustrate how distance between repeated objects matters, 2 examples featuring the exact same pattern except with object spacing changed should have been used, instead of 2 patterns of different colour! Ceteris paribus - change one variable only at a time, ok?

[Abbie Butcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting take on forming patterns, habits, and hobbies that help create art. Would use some of these skills and ideas for teaching classes.

[Aiden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun, inspiring, easy to read or just to browse

[Reni Hanifah · Rating 5 out of 5]

dilengkapi exercise2 yang sangat berguna untuk diriku yang malas menggambar ini~