Journal: Testing 10 Motif Ideas in 30 Days — What Worked

Thirty days, ten motifs and a sketchbook that no longer closes properly. The plan was three days per idea: one to study the source, one to draw badly on purpose, one to apply it somewhere. Thirty days is short enough that a bad week two does not sink the whole thing, and long enough that you stop producing your first, obvious answer. Some of it worked. Some of it wasted good paper. Here is the honest version.

The rules I set before starting

Constraints do the heavy lifting. A vague intention to get better at pattern is not a project, it is a mood. So I wrote five rules on the inside cover and stuck to them:

1. Ten motifs, fixed. Chosen on day one, no swaps, even when motif six turned out to be a dud.
2. Three days each. Study, draw, apply. No carrying over into a fourth day.
3. A limited kit. One A5 sketchbook, a 0.3 fineliner, a 2B pencil, six pans of gouache. Nothing new bought.
4. Photograph everything in the same spot by the window, including the pages I wanted to tear out.
5. Ten minutes minimum, even on days I could not face it. Ten minutes almost always turned into forty.

The list matters less than having one at all. Set your own, but set something you cannot quietly renegotiate at ten o'clock on a Tuesday.

What worked

Three days is about right

Day one was always collecting: drawing the object from life, making notes on how it was put together. Day two meant twenty fast variations — squashed, stretched, halved, rotated, drawn in a single line. Day three was application: a tile, a border, a card, a scrap of wrapping paper. By day three I knew whether a motif had legs. By day four I would have started polishing something that did not deserve polishing.

Drawing the thing itself, not another design

The pomegranate page was the best of the month. I bought one, cut it open, drew the arils as a loose grid of circles, then tightened them into a repeat. Compare that with the knotwork motif, which I copied from a photograph of a carved stone. The copy was accurate enough. I still could not tell you how the knot was built, and it shows in every version I drew afterwards. Picking up a shoelace and tying it badly taught me more in ten minutes.

Working at two scales

Every motif got drawn at roughly 2cm and roughly 12cm. A small mark needs a strong silhouette; a large one can carry detail. The scallop shell only came alive at 12cm, where the ribs had room to fan out. The little checkerboard tile only ever worked at 2cm, cropped tight. Two of my ten ideas were rescued purely by changing size.

Making one deliberately ugly version

On day two of every motif I drew it in five minutes with a fat brush, the wrong colour, no erasing. It broke the preciousness. Several motifs only revealed their proper shape once I had stopped trying to draw them well.

What failed

• Motif six, the acorn. Too fussy, no silhouette, and the cap offered nothing for a repeat to hook onto. I should have cut it on day two and given the time elsewhere. Fixed motifs was the wrong rule; fixed total time was the right one.
• Evening sessions. Most drawing happened after nine at night. Lines came out tight and decisions came out cautious. The same motif drawn before breakfast was noticeably looser.
• Colour first. Two motifs stalled because I went hunting for a palette before I had a shape. Colour hides a weak shape rather than improving it.
• Chasing the repeat too early. Trying to make something tileable on day two dragged every idea into a grid long before it was ready.
• Ambitious pages. The days I planned a finished composition were the days I produced nothing at all.

The middle week, and the one thing that saved it

Days fourteen to nineteen were grim. The initial novelty had gone, the deadline felt distant, and the motifs were the awkward middle ones — the hare, the sunburst — that neither failed loudly nor worked immediately. What rescued the month was the daily photograph. Knowing that every page would be lined up in one folder by the window made it harder to skip a day, and easier to see that the run of weak drawings was a phase rather than a verdict.

The sunburst turned out to be the sleeper of the ten. Useless as an all-over repeat, because it needs a centre and a pause, but lovely as a single mark in a border. The hare worked as a silhouette and fell apart the moment I added eyes and fur. A surprising amount of this month came down to accepting what a motif wanted to be rather than what I had planned for it.

What I would change next time

1. Six motifs, not ten. Ten spread the attention too thin, and the good three got the same three days as the duds.
2. Draw in the morning where possible, or protect one long session at the weekend.
3. One line of written notes per day. What did I try? What changed? A single sentence would have preserved far more than my memory did.
4. Name the output before starting. Ten tiles for a kitchen splashback, a set of cards, a length of printed fabric. A destination changes how bold you are prepared to be.

What to try next

Two formats appeal. The first is the reverse of this month: one motif, thirty days. Take the pomegranate and push it until it breaks — different weights, grids, colourways, scales, hand-drawn against cut paper. Depth beats breadth almost every time.

The second is a themed set of ten, drawn for a single surface: ten tile designs, ten border patterns, ten motifs for a tea towel. Working to a real constraint stops the month drifting into a pile of unrelated sketches. And if you can find a friend to run the same thirty days alongside you, even loosely, a weekly swap of photographs does more for momentum than any amount of planning.

If you want to start on Monday

Keep it small and make it visible. Choose six motifs you genuinely like the look of — shells, leaves, tiles, coins, seed heads, whatever you already notice in the world. Give each one three days. Set out one sketchbook and a short list of tools, and leave them somewhere you will trip over them. Photograph every page in the same light, even the failures, especially the failures.

At the end of the month, lay the photographs out in order and look for the pattern in your own choices. You will probably find that two or three motifs did most of the work. Those are the ones to carry forward, and they are rarely the ones you expected at the start.

Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay