Seadragons

The contest this week was for a ditsy print, involving some form of sea creature. My parents were in town visiting when I started working on it, so I asked my mom for suggestions on what her favorite creatures were (minus jellyfish, since they had already announced that next week's design should involve jellyfish!). She threw out a few suggestions and I decided to go with leafy seadragons - those really ornate seahorses with lots of appendages to help them blend with kelp.

For the colors, I browsed around on ColourLovers and found this palette I liked:

Color by COLOURlovers

Here's the design I made:



I'm pretty happy with the repeat - there's a fairly good variety of orientations and so not too many long lines for the eye to try to follow. There were actually two other entries using seadragons - this one and this one. Mine came in 102 out of 214 with 120 votes. The winning fabric has a really neat use of color to suggest iridescence! My favorite entry was this one, which suggests a coral reef.