A repeating pattern made of retro-styled rockets, ray-guns, and asteroids
Rayguns and Rocketships Digital

This repeating pattern was made as an in-class demo for my illustration students. They're given an assignment to create a simple surface design collection with just one hero pattern and one secondary, and I made this pattern to demonstrate the process of working from a theme or motif through rough sketches to modular pattern assets and into assembled pattern compositions. It's a two-day assignment, but only a one-class demo, so I didn't create a secondary pattern to go with this.

The theme here is "rayguns and rocketships" (think Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon). 

A page of rough sketches of floating spacemen, planets, asteroids, rocket ships, and ray-guns
When doing the initial sketches, I also wanted to have a couple little spacemen in the pattern, but I decided they weren't really necessary.
A graphic showing the individual illustration components of the repeating pattern above.
Here are the nine finished assets for the hero pattern. A cloudy, cosmic nebula background asset was added at the end to tie everything together.

The final part of the assignment is to turn their pattern into a real product that people can buy. To demonstrate, I uploaded this pattern to my RedBubble account and created a throw pillow, which is still available. 

This one should be indexed at the home page, and at year P.

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