This week’s project was inspired by the 1st exercise of a year-long class I’m taking, the Year of the Spark, with Carla Sonheim.

One warm-up exercise consisted of quick one-liners, that is, drawings you make without lifting your pen from the paper until you’re finished, which gives the resulting doodles a weird look, but can also get surprising results and is a great way of letting go. Among the series of cats, birds, houses, etc. that spontaneously emerged on the paper, there was one cat shape I found interesting (see the steps below), so I decided to use this one for the next step of the exercise, rendering one of the drawings with all kinds of tools.

I actually really liked some of the resulting cats, re-drew some of them several times with a simple black pen (the “shaky” hand was inspired by a drawing made by the teacher in one of the class videos), and I decided to transform them even further: here they are as a seamless pattern. And oh, look, doesn’t the pattern look dashing on a pillow, mockups really give a new perspective on things, doesn’t it!

There was another one-line drawing I really liked, a blob-ish/square bird, so there may be more one-line doodles inspired projects in the near future.

A few possible colorways

Overview of the work in progress, from doodle to pattern tests