Strange Forms

The process

From drawing to something that looks stitched

Every Strange Forms pattern starts as a drawing.

The story of Jungle

A little escape into the green

Jungle started with the feeling of wanting to be somewhere warm.

Imagine lying on the ground somewhere green and quiet, looking up through enormous leaves at a patch of blue sky. It’s the sort of place you imagine when it’s cold outside and summer feels unnecessarily far away.

I wanted to turn that feeling into a pattern. Large tropical leaves became the main shapes, with layers of greenery overlapping each other like the view from underneath a jungle canopy.

Then came the embroidery idea.

I wanted the leaves to feel as though someone had stitched them onto fabric by hand. So instead of simply drawing a botanical illustration, I rebuilt the lines and surfaces using small repeated marks that imitate embroidery stitches.

The final pattern is printed rather than embroidered, but the stitch-like drawing gives it the warmth and texture of a handmade textile.

Jungle is a little piece of imaginary summer for days when you need one.

For Jungle, I began with botanical shapes and loose pencil sketches, then gradually developed the leaves, contours and internal details. Once the basic illustration was working, I started replacing ordinary drawn lines with repeated marks designed to resemble stitches.

The result is deliberately somewhere between illustration and embroidery. Up close, you can see that the “stitches” are actually drawn marks. From further away, they come together into a textile-like pattern.

  1. Procreate screenshot, cropped, of a loose black pencil sketch of monstera and palm leaves used to develop the Jungle pattern
    Procreate screenshot (cropped): the pencil sketch, working out the leaf shapes and how they overlap.

    Start with the drawing

    The first stage is about shapes, composition and movement. I sketch the leaves and work out how the individual elements will fit together as a repeating pattern.

  2. Draw the stitches

    Instead of using a conventional textured brush and calling it a day, I build the embroidered appearance into the illustration itself. Lines become repeated stitch-like marks, while areas of the leaves are filled with small crosses and other repeated details.

    Procreate screenshot of a monstera leaf traced in dark green stitch-like dashes over a grey pencil sketch
    The whole Procreate screenshot.
    Close-up of a monstera leaf traced in dark green stitch-like dashes over grey pencil lines
    Close-up: every line is a row of separate drawn dashes.

  3. Build the pattern

    Individual illustrated elements are combined into a larger composition. Colour, density and scale are adjusted so the pattern works as a blanket rather than just as a standalone illustration.

    The same monstera and palm leaves with the layer of small green crosses shown, filling the large leaf (Procreate screenshot, cropped)
    Monstera and palm leaves drawn in green stitch-like outlines with no fill (Procreate screenshot, cropped)
    Procreate screenshots (cropped). Left of the line: outlines only. Right of the line: with the layer of small crosses.
  4. The finished Jungle pattern, monstera and palm leaves in green and grey stitch-like lines and small crosses on a dark green ground Close-up of the finished pattern, a monstera leaf filled with rows of small green crosses inside a stitched outline
    The finished Jungle pattern, after Photoshop. In the circle: the small crosses at full size.

    Finish the stitches

    When the drawing is finished in Procreate, I take it into Photoshop and make the stitches look far more realistic. This is the finished Jungle pattern.

  5. Jungle blanket draped over a pale grey sofa next to a large potted plant
    The finished Jungle artwork on the blanket (product mock-up).

    Print, don’t embroider

    The final artwork is printed onto the blanket. The embroidery is an illusion created by the illustration itself. The blanket is not actually embroidered.

    Buy the Jungle blanket See all the designs