Floral and Foliage

Recently I went to the Sandringham Flower Show with my sketchbook and camera, expecting to be drawn to the flowers themselves. Instead it was the foliage that stopped me — the repeating veins, the layered overlaps, the small irregularities that keep a leaf pattern from ever quite matching itself. I came home with far more photographs of leaves than blooms, and I've been lost in floral pattern illustration ever since.

Working from those references, I've been deliberately narrowing my palette. Fewer colours than feels natural, and reaching for ones I wouldn't normally choose — a muddy ochre instead of green, a dusty pink where I'd usually put red. It's harder than it sounds. Restriction forces decisions I'd otherwise avoid, and the results feel more considered for it. I've also been resisting the plain white background I default to, testing different grounds instead — texture, tone, and colour underneath the pattern rather than around it. It changes how each piece sits, and I'm still working out which grounds serve the patterns rather than fighting them.

Alongside all of this, I've rediscovered Gombrich — The Sense of Order, specifically, which I read years ago and clearly didn't absorb properly the first time. His questions about why we're drawn to pattern at all, what order and repetition satisfy in us, feel newly relevant now that I'm making the patterns rather than just looking at them. It's a text I want to sit with properly rather than skim for reference. William Morris keeps surfacing too, inevitably — his patterns were never just decoration, and I'm curious what sits underneath that same instinct in my own work, three centuries removed from his workshop.

What I don't know yet is what these pieces actually are. Whether they work as standalone nature-inspired pattern designs in their own right, or whether they want to be collaged, layered, combined into something larger. There's something I love about the hand-drawn quality of them as they stand — a rawness I don't want to lose by overworking them into something else.

For now, I'm letting that question sit unanswered and just making more.