Printing and pattern
Art & Design · Early Years · The School
What makes a pattern
A PATTERN repeats. Red, blue, red, blue is a pattern; red, blue, green, orange is not — it is just colours. The repeat is the whole idea. Say your pattern out loud as you make it and you will hear when it breaks.
Printing with objects
Dip the end of a cork, a leaf, a fork or a sponge in paint and press it down. Press once and lift straight up — dragging smudges it. The same object printed twenty times becomes a pattern, and that is how printed cloth has been made for thousands of years.
Patterns everywhere
Look at tiles, bricks, cloth, fences, a honeycomb, the scales on a fish. Patterns are so common that we stop seeing them. Find three in the room you are in now.
Print a leaf, then a cork, then a leaf, then a cork, across the page. Someone else could carry it on, because it REPEATS in order — a pattern. Now print a leaf, a fork, a bottle top, a hand and a cork in no order. It fills the page and nobody could say what comes next, so it is texture, not pattern. The test is whether you could continue it.