Dana Amundsen

Morris and Co. Patterns

Date: 12/02/22
Tags: #victorian , #design

A floral pattern in muted colors. The overall shape is an hourglass of vines with flowers and leaves interlaced inside them.

A floral pattern on a diagonal. A flower wraps around a banner that runs diagonally with small leaves and flower shapes filling in the negative space of the pattern.

I’m planning to update my websites and I wanted to give them a Victorian inspired design since I’ve been very into Victorian clothing and history recently.

I went to see an exhibit on Morris and Co. patterns at the Chicago Art Institute titled “Morris and Company: The Business of Beauty” this past summer and the designs really made an impression on me. I love how they balance nature and geometry. I wanted to recreate some of the patterns to use as tiled backgrounds on websites and possibly for illustrations as well. It turned out to be much more challenging than I thought! Click through to read more about the process and see the reference images I used for these patterns.

I found this tutorial, Making Repeating Patterns in Clip Studio Paint, on making tiled patterns in Clip Studio and followed it to make my patterns. It took some getting used to, and I made 3 ‘duds’ before I finally got one to work. I pulled refereneces from the Every Morris twitter account. For the first one I was able to ‘see’ how it would tile and I made my pattern by eyeballing it.

The original Morris and Co. pattern that the first pattern was based on.
original tweet

I recorded a timelapse of this one. You can see that I started with a looser interpretation in black and white. I was planning to fill and color the lines but the pattern didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I scrapped it and tried again with color from the start. It seemed to work better, and the result was more true to the original this time.

A timelapse gif of the first pattern being drawn in Clip Studio.

The next one I wanted to make was this beautiful diagonal pattern.

The original Morris and Co. pattern that the second pattern was based on.
original tweet

I tried to do it by eye but I couldn’t get it to tile seemlessly so I ended up simply tracing the pattern to get the tile to work. Yes it felt like I was cheating but it did work so ultimately I’m happy with it.

I’d like to make more of these, and do them in different colorways just like the original patterns were sold in different colors. If you see them popping up here or on my other websites you’ll know how I made them.

Roald Amundsen Portrait / From the Desk of...

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