Last month I finished Picture This: How Pictures Work. Written by Molly Bang, it’s a brief book about composition in design that describes our reactions to various design elements. I liked it very much because it’s clear and easy to read. I gained many insights from the author’s experience, including how color, shape, and placement on a page impact our perception of images.

One principle that I found interesting was this: “space implies time.” To demonstrate this, Bang shows the following two images.

From the first image, she observes that the closeness between the two figures (victim and attacker) could imply that they’re merely having a chat.

When in the second image, there is more space between the two figures, one has “more time to be scared. . . To put it in purely formal terms, there is more tension in the picture because the objects are ‘on edge’ at the two poles of the page, separated from each other by the vast, diagonal empty space cutting through the center, but associated and drawn together by color.”

Anyway, I was inspired to create this repeat pattern.

Here’s the original photo.

Here’s my watercolor.

Speaking of wabi sabi style, I can’t help but think of Japan and this artwork from illustrator Tatsuro Kiuchi.

If you haven’t downloaded the MadPattern templates yet, I really recommend you give them a try soon. Then you can join the Flickr group and upload your creations, which then appear on the MadPattern website gallery as a seamless pattern.

Here’s the result with the roses fabric in cornflower blue on the lamp shade.

Many thanks to Favaro Jr for letting me use his beautiful photograph as a starting point.

Taking color inspiration from the first of these three fabrics, I created this repeat pattern.

I wondered what it might look like on a hoodie, so I found this photo on Flickr . . .

. . . and did a little work in Photoshop to come up with this below.

This is what it could look like as a throw pillow.

Thanks to Mirage Floors for the photo on Flickr.

by Schauleh Sahba