Christmas Pattern - Tigerprint

Tigerprint.
The Brief.
This month the competition is all about designing Christmas wrap.
We would like you to consider what makes a great allover repeat pattern for Christmas wrapping paper. Is it a traditional foliage pattern, a cute character, a scene or photographic?
Play to your strengths as a designer and enjoy playing with scale, colour and repeats. Consider how your wrap will look on a roll and how a gift will look when wrapped in your design.
Look out for inspirational posts to help you on our blog over the coming weeks. We can't wait to see your festive designs!

Initial Thoughts.
I have previously entered a few Tigerprint competitions, and I haven't been very proud of any of the submissions I have done, and just did them so that I could complete a competition brief, and have more experience with them. With this brief I am only going to submit the patterns I am proud of, and think could win, or something that I would wan to put my name to.
I started to think about Christmas and what I think about Christmas. A lot of Christmas products recently are about presents and sweets e.t.c. With this brief I decided I want to go back to what I think Christmas should really be about, the natural joy, not simply about monetary goods and material things. This has lead me to think about the outdoors and the snow and the iconic snowman. This is something I want to explore with this brief, snowmen and the outdoors.
Also every Tigerprint brief advises you to look into current designs used in Marks & Spensers, this is becasue this is where most of their designs are. This is something in the previous competition briefs I have just ignored and thought that I wouldn't need to research into as it is such a short brief, but this time I will definitely be finding some current M&S designs.
  
Development.
(insert image of different layouts)
In the brief it states that the pattern could explore, colours, shapes, characters and scenes, therefore I thought I would start by looking into different Christmas scenes and draw out a few different ideas. Going with the ideas of an outdoors scene and characters I thought that I would start digitally creating a snowman.

With this illustration I have tried to make it quite detailed to add dimension to the snowmen as this is the style in which I like to design. I also think that it will be more appropriate for M&S. A lot of the illustrations that are really simple with no detail on them that I have tried look really tacky and childlike. This is something that I am trying to avoid doing with this brief, this is why I am adding more detail.

I tried a few different layouts for them to be in, including different amounts of snowflakes. I think that having snowflakes makes the print look less blocky and more like a pattern that flows. I am happy with this, and think that it is better than the other submissions I have made for Tigerprint.

Instead of submitting lots of different variations and layouts of the same thing, I think that having another outdoor scene would work well, so I decided to create trees, like a woodland area. I did this by creating a symbol on illustrator and spraying a tree. Adding snow gives the effect of Christmas in my opinion.

Adding snowflakes to the background gave the print a better effect in my opinion. I also thought that it could be interesting to put the two illustrations together. Although I still think that there is still something missing, maybe need to try and ass some colours, or make the scene a night time scene.

Colour Experiments.

I think that these layouts work so much better with a colour behind them, it makes it look more interesting/less boring. The dark blue looks like its night and the light blue looks like the daytime, even though snow is white, sometimes the colour used is blue.

Alternative layouts and illustrations.

I have decided to create a scene with both the snowman and snowy trees in the pattern. This is so that it would like an outdoor scene. I prefer this illustration using the lighter blue as the background than the singular illustrations of the trees and the snowmen. Although I think that the wrapping paper pattern is still quite standard. To me they are still quite boring, and the last one is the only one that I would be happy to submit right now. I need to consider the audience a bit more and make something that is less ordinary and not something that has been seen before.