Tropical Fusion Blog Hop!

Welcome to my Blog and in particular a big welcome and thank you for joining in the Tropical Fusion Blog Hop!  I’m guessing that you’ve arrived here from the wonderful Onneke Van Waardenburg’s Blog?  If so, I hope you enjoyed looking at her lovely collection.  Or maybe you just stumbled across the Blog Hop by accident? Well lucky you as you’re definitely in for a treat!

Tropical Fusion Logo by Lisa Rivas

You can read more about Mary Tanana’s of Groovity Designs brilliant idea behind the Blog Hop here but for now I’d love it if you’d stay here a little while and have a look at my collection.

I’m a Surface Pattern Designer based in beautiful Yorkshire in the UK and have been creating patterns for textiles, wallpaper, homewares and much more for the last 8 years. To find out more about me and my work, then please feel free to browse my site but for now back to the Blog Hop!

I have to admit that the Tropical theme and Radiant Orchid colour was a little out of my comfort zone but once I got started and got my head round the idea that it was ok to put my own style into the tropical theme, I was soon flying (there’s a theme here!)!  I started my collection by building a Tropical Fusion moodboard over on Pinterest (for those of you who don’t already know me, I’m slightly obsessed with Pinterest!), this helped to gather my ideas and inspire my designs.

I’d love for you to pin and share any of the images in this post but please just keep the image descriptions with the pin, thank you!

I decided I wanted to base my collection around tropical birds (told you there was a theme!) and tropical flowers, so I began sketching out hummingbirds and tropical flowers.  I love the stunning colours in the hummingbirds and the fact that they’re so tiny and beautiful.

Next came the colours and bringing the design to life!  I played around with different colour palettes, (probably for too long!) ensuring that the Radiant Orchid shone through. I tried bold, striking colours and contrasting bright colours but finally settled on a more subtle palette that hopefully still feels tropical and is a little bit more ‘me’!  It’s a Design Seeds colour palette called Pistachio Hues

The result was my main design “Hummingbirds”

I then developed the bird theme and created my first co-ordinate in the collection which is still  inspired by birds and is called “Tropical Feathers”.

I then wanted a nice tropical feel geometric design to finish the mini-collection off…..

So here we have my brand new “Tropical Fusion” Collection!

I thought it would be fun to see what my new designs would look like on some products, what do you think?

Thank you for taking the time to look through my Tropical Fusion collection and I really hope you enjoyed it!  If you’d like to see more fabulous tropical inspired patterns then please head on over to the very talented Anna Berger’s Blog or if you prefer to start the hop from the beginning then you can hop on over to Groovity Designs. Either way, you’ll get to see the whole hop as it’s all linked! I hope you enjoy the ride!