Top 5 ways to make more out of your art motifs

You have spent all this time painting the cutest flowers. You scanned them and removed the paper background, and vectorized them. You start building a pattern and realize you don’t have enough motifs. So you paint some more… rinse and repeat, amiright?

I have figured out a way to make those initial motifs go a long way and I am going to share it with you now.

Recolor

Yes, we use recolor to create new colorways, but within the same colorway, you can have that pink rose become a blue rose or an off-white rose.

Reflect and rotate

It may not seem like much, but just having a flower facing the other way gives you an extra motif to fit in your patterns.

Regroup

If you painted individual flowers, create little clusters of them, if you painted clusters, how about separating them into individual blooms? Take this opportunity to swap flower centers, leaves, and form new clusters.

The puppet tool

This is an amazing tool, that works with Illustrator and Photoshop. It creates a mesh around the object and you can hinge points and move them around as if you were moving a puppet. Do you have a leaf that is too straight? Bend it! A branch that doesn’t attach where you want? Stretch it. A flower that is too stiff? Tilt it. And you have new motifs!

Use some symmetry

When I paint, I like flowing, loose motifs, but sometimes, the pattern calls for something more symmetrical. So you can trim a motif and reflect it. New symmetrical motif ready!

Of course, you can use all of these methods together.

Have you used any of these methods? Tag me on Instagram @samantha.make.things