Feathers in multiple colors

The contest this week: feathers. I decided this time to just go literal and do feathers, simply scattered in a pattern reminiscent of basketweave, but play around with color a bit. My starting point was the website COLOURLovers, which lets people name colors, create color palettes (up to five colors together) and apply them to repeating patterns. They even have an integration with Spoonflower, so you can get designs you create on COLOURLovers printed out by Spoonflower, but I haven't made use of that myself. I have created some palettes & patterns though, and you can see them here. I have used palettes created by others in some of my fabrics before - the cameos and the wrestling mask so far. Anyway, you can also vote for any palettes you like as your favorites, and see which others are favorites. Here are the palettes on the site which have been favorited the most. I found it very interesting how many of those are reminiscent of the infamous teal/orange palette overtaking movies.

First, I decided to work with this one:

Color by COLOURlovers

When I sketched the flower design initially, I used black outlines and quick ovals of color to decide which feathers would be which colors. I kind of liked the way that looked, so I kept the black outlines in the final design. Once it was done, though, I liked it less - looks a little too 80's. I was tempted to keep tweaking it but in the end just left it as is. I think this color combo might be used better by making the proportions less even - emphasizing some colors and leaving some as just small accents.



Next, I tried this one:

Color by COLOURlovers

I used the brown for the outlines instead, resulting in this design. I like this better, so this is the one I entered in the contest. I think my design is a bit leaden, though. Not one of my best efforts, since I couldn't think of any twist or inspiration like I usually try to.



There were many, many designs which were a lot like mine - scattered, tossed, and otherwise evenly distributed feathers. It was the first thing that came to mind for me, and evidentally for many others as well! Another big theme was peacock feathers, which I didn't surprise me in the least. My design came in 116 out of 224, with 63 votes.