Lately, I've been watching a lot of Skillshare classes on how to create repeating patterns. I feel like this is an area of graphic design that I've never been particularly good at and that it would be really handy to have in my creative toolbox. 

Since it's always easier to work on a project when you have an objective, I set a brief for myself to design some Christmas cards to send out to my friends and family. I wanted something that looked festive, but not cheesy. Traditional Christmas motifs always feel a bit strange to use here in the southern hemisphere, so I thought it would be fun to create a very "Aussie" Christmas card.

Since it's summer here, there's so many beautiful native flowers in bloom that I felt inspired to create a pattern using native Australian flora. Many Australian flowers are quite complex (...they tend to be quite fluffy and feathery!) so it can be a challenge to stylise them down to simple forms. I sketched up a few that I like the look of, scanned in my sketches and hand traced them in Illustrator so that I had nice clean vectors. I took the traditional Christmas colour palette of red and green and tweaked it, so that red became pinks and oranges, and green became blue.

I applied my newly designed pattern to my card layout, which I kept super simple to let the pattern shine and simply added in a message with one of my favourite typefaces, GT Sectra from Grilli Type.