Drawing before repeating

There is a shortcut in printed textile design where you build the repeat first and decorate it afterwards. It is fast, and it always looks like it. The motif ends up serving the tile rather than the other way around.

Start with a drawing that has no repeat in mind

For the Hibiscus commission I drew the flower at roughly A2, in pencil, several dozen times before anything was scanned. Drawing at that scale forces decisions you cannot fake later: where the line weight thickens, how the petal folds behind itself, which parts of the stem are allowed to disappear.

Then let the repeat break the drawing

Only after the motif exists does the tiling begin, and the interesting part is what breaks. A half-drop that works beautifully at 32cm may collapse into visible diagonal banding at 16cm. Instead of correcting the drawing, I usually cut it — removing a leaf, letting a stem run off the tile edge — so the eye never finds the grid.

Production is a design constraint, not an afterthought

Two things decide whether a print survives contact with a mill:

1. Colour count. Every additional screen is cost. Reworking a nine-colour drawing into five almost always improves it.
2. Scale relative to the cut. A motif that reads well on a flat swatch can land entirely inside a single panel once the pattern pieces are placed.

I now check both before the drawing is finished, which sounds unromantic but is the reason the motifs still look hand-made once they come back on fabric.