I was in great need of a fresh wallpaper for my computer, so I created one, inspired by a 17th century painting. As one does.

When I visited Montréal in 2013, I spent several happy hours at the Museum of Fine Art, and there’s one picture I took during my usual game of Let’s Spot Pretty Patterns In Old Paintings that I always kept in mind: The Young Girl With Still Life, a painting attributed to the dutch Floris Van Schooten, dated around 1620. Look how interesting the pattern on her dress is!

This was my project for this week: recreating a pattern inspired by Floris Van Schooten’s.

The pattern is not terribly complicated to break down on paper, but it’s the deceptively simple kind that requires a lot of accuracy once you recreate it on screen. I’m not especially comfortable with that kind, and yet, I thought I would create it in Illustrator. And? And even though I’ve been using Photoshop for about 10 years, I’ve never actually learned how to use Illustrator properly. Some curse words may have been uttered, and I have many, many hours in front of me before Illustrator becomes natural, but thankfully, I switched back to Photoshop as soon as the basic shapes were done, and I have something to show at the end. It’s not an exact copy, but the spirit is the same, and I like how different it is from my usual style:

And here’s the wallpaper I made out of it. If you’re interested, you can download it for your own computer, the links are right below the picture. And now, let’s go back to learning Illustrator. I shall conquer this, I shall!

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