Pansy Backsplash Update

About

I discovered a Spoonflower a Design Challenge for a kitchen backsplash.It just so happens I designed a backsplash for myself a couple of years ago in a lovely and light pansy design of my favorite colors: purple, yellow, teal, spring green. It’s a 6 inch by 24 inch metal print ordered from my pattern on Flickr [above].

I wrote about my plan for this in Pansy Backsplash. I had the first pattern idea to start with, and another I had already uploaded to Spoonflower, so it cannot be used in the new challenge.

I wanted something with more details for a wallpaper pattern, and something that didn’t quite show the basic pattern. So I decided to use the diamond as a starting point and tried four different versions until I found one I liked that would look good as a wallpaper backsplash.

In the one I love, I wanted to keep a few open spaces to maintain the light feel. There’s texture on the white background in soft spring green. You can see I created two hero motifs so the pattern had some variation. Then I added extra pieces of yellow flowers and teal and green leaves to extend the pattern over the diamond space in a few places.

Letting It Sit

In my mind, I kept thinking about the challenges suggestions on Spoonflower:

Take inspiration from faux tile designs, architectural details and kitchen iconography to design something that would transform a traditional backsplash into a work of art. Think about small or medium scale and symmetry when designing to create a visually appealing (or appetizing) entry.

Spoonflower Backsplash Design Challenge

It was that word “tile” that kept bugging me, so I let my design sit a while until I came up with the idea of a type of vine separating the hero patterns within the design.

I liked it, but the space where the teal vines meet seemed unfinished. So, with a lot of left /right and up/down movement of the design, I was able to place leaves and yellow filler flowers to cover the end points of the added diamond shaped vine.

The Updated Design

Find these in the Lemon, Ladybugs, Pansies Collection on Spoonflower, along with these items from other designs with these motifs:

The updated designs are also in the Floral Delight and Wildflowers collections on Spoonflower, if you’d like to check out other floral designs I’ve created.

Lesson Learned

Spoonflower challenges are now two weeks apart. That means artists can design, revise, and let the idea simmer for a while before making final tweaks to create an illustration that best fits the challenge’s goals. Is this one of your strategies? To let your mind and art rest a bit to allow the creative juices to inspire revisions? What do you think?