Print Design Feature: Birds & Flowers

The Birds & Flowers Print
Our Most Sought After Print, Featuring All Original Hand Drawn Artwork, Crafted Together Into A Whimsical And Slightly Abstract World...

The Making Of

The Birds and Flowers print design concept was to create a wonderful, whimsical world of bright colours and interweaving florals. Inspired by William Morris, but with no symmetry. To create a contemporary design for wallpaper application and eventually product surfaces.


I was a little apprehensive about starting the the drawings for the wallpaper design, after spending time at university drawing and designing conceptually without thinking too much about the commercial viability of what I was doing.


Starting the ball rolling with my own new designs, knowing I was going to have to create a marketable product at the end was more difficult than I had imagined. It wasn't the difficulty of the drawing, it was knowing that every moment I spent drawing ought to be something that was useful for a future design, otherwise I would feel like I was wasting time.

The blue tropical, is the most popular bird, he features boldly coloured in the City Tale variation, but is toned down slightly for the Precious Mineral and Pearl variations.


After much deliberation over what and how to start creating imagery, I decided to just do what felt right. I started by drawing the birds collection.. This was a shock to myself and everyone else, my design handwriting had always been industrial and geometric. Yet there I was creating tropical birds! I decided to go with it and see where it led.
Drawing

I used my favourite Unipin fine liner pens and began drawing.

I had to force myself to stop drawing birds eventually. I was having so much fun exploring colour and creating texture effects. I will certainly be considering creating a 'tropical birds' wallpaper in the future, having seen how popular this design concept was. Then I can really go wild with the colour, shape and style of the birds.

Little yellow breasted bird, this tiny guy is almost missed when you glance quickly at the design, he is a little pop of colour in the top corner and is a great contrast to the large blue bird and deep coloured background.

Paper

The birds were all drawn separately on A3 super smooth paper, so they could be digitally scanned very easily. I am considering making a series of limited edition art prints from these original drawings. Look out for those coming soon!

Digital Finish

The drawings were added to the wallpaper design digitally, after being scanned they were touched up in Photoshop, cut out and manipulated to sit in realistic places within the wallpaper design.

Having spent so many hours drawing the birds I wanted to avoid too much heavy digital editing. I played around with colours and scale etc but decided to leave them as similar to how they were drawn as possible.

Photoshop is of course great for cutting the image out to place in the design and for touching up any hand smudges or flecks of dust that might of landed on the drawing.

I created the final design with the birds in place, the repeat done and colour variations complete. I then had the marvellous idea of testing out a few effects on the drawings, digitally, just to see what happened. Most filters created a hideous mess of what I had just created.. and then I found the Oil Paint filter. I was reluctant to use it as I felt it was taking something away from my drawings. If used to heavily, the design becomes a weird manufactured looking blur, but I sampled the print using only the tiniest percentage of the filter and the results were excellent.

The result of the Photoshop edit was achieving smoother lines, the harsh sometimes rough edges of the hand drawing were lightly smoothed and everything seemed to gel together more. It was as if the individual elements were nestled into the surface of the print, and were not just sitting on top. I saved the two files - before and after and spent a long time deciding which one would be the finished design. I was worried that people would not understand what I had done to create this design and that the hand drawn aspect would be tarnished.

Click to open a larger version of the 'before' design.. compare to the second 'after' image. See the slight difference in the line quality.

I hope you will agree that when you look closely at the 'before' and 'after' the Photoshop filter, the results are very subtle.


As a print lover, I made the decision ultimately to do what worked best for the design. Yes the raw hand drawn imagery was great and completely natural, but if I wanted this wallpaper to be the very best it could, I had to make the right decision and use the Photoshop edit to complete the design.
Test Print And Launch

The final step in production was to get a wallpaper test print done, to check for precision detail, quality, colour and style. We LOVED the result and launched the wallpaper within a few days.

The wallpaper is now available in three variations, City Tale, Precious Mineral and Pearl.

Which One Is Your Favourite?

The Birds wallpaper collection is available now, as a luxury made to order wallpaper and the City Tale version has been restyled and launched as a cushion design.

Birds & Flowers Handmade Cushion

Handmade cushion, a bright a bold accessory for your interior, full of life and energy.

I hope you enjoyed the Birds creation story, why not check out one of the other posts about how I create designs for surface print, or perhaps one about inside the business of Surface House.


Thanks for reading, please leave your thoughts below!