I am not a thrill seeker. Rollercoasters beyond the scope of what is offered at Disneyland scare me, but for some reason, the idea of floating in the air in a hot air balloon I’m ok with. Ever since I mentally put this on my bucket list I have seen a lot of deadly hot air balloon accidents that make me a little on edge about going but, I’m sure it will be fine.
This love of balloon riding is what the pattern this week is based on. In the future, I would like to tweak this pattern a little bit. I want to create more variation in the balloons’ patterns and find a better color for the background but, for now, this pattern is good.
For this pattern, I wanted to give you a little bit of a behind the scenes of how I created certain aspects of this pattern. I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about 10 Illustrator Tools Every Surface Pattern Designer Should Know. One of the tools mentioned in that post was the draw inside tool. I cannot reiterate how great the draw inside tool is for creating patterns and illustrations. The area where I found this tool really helpful was creating the basket for the hot air balloon.
I wanted to create vertical lines in the basket to give it a bit more texture. This could have been achieved by drawing the lines slightly outside the line of the basket, using pathfinders divide tool to divide the lines on the baskets edge, and deleting the excess lines, however with the draw inside tool I only had to complete the first step: draw the lines slightly outside the line of the basket.
This pattern is the 6th in my design challenge. It’s not too late to join. You can join at any time by heading over to my design challenge blog post and posting your designs to Instagram using the hashtag #kmpdesignchallenge.
What is something you would put on your bucket list?
