Interesting playing with pattern design on my Tumbling Tardigrades . I have so much to learn, clearly. I might take a Skillshare class over winter break, when I have more time.
• The first one is just me drawing the tardigrades and then setting them tumbling on a plain background.
• In the second, on the advice of Spoonflower artists after I asked for critique, I increased the contrast between the outline and body color, so the features became more visible — they were disappearing to a lot of viewers. (I think they got cuter, but also a bit less like polka dots, and I know there was someone who wanted polka dots that were actually something else, so I may keep offering both options.)
• For the next step, I wanted to try a relevant background — so I drew a separate mycelial network as a repeating pattern (took two episodes of Episodes, a moderately funny sitcom about some screenwriters, on Netflix), and then dropped the saturation to 25%.
• As a next step, I flipped some of the tardigrades on the vertical / horizontal axis, and changed some of their sizes, then set them tumbling. I think having some bigger and some larger actually really contributes to the sense of depth, which I like a lot, in particular for this pattern, thematically. It still kind of looks like they’re floating on top of the network — I might try dropping some of them behind it, to increase the sense of depth.
If you haven’t been watching Discovery, you might not realize this is a sci-fi pattern, but I promise you, it’s full of space travel spore drive geekery. 
