Low on creative juice? Filler patterns to the rescue!

We are in the last stretch of a long grueling, unbearably hot summer over here. The monsoon is late, the threat of a super El Niño is becoming more real and daunting with each days passing and Mumbai has about 40 days left of water supply. Throw in a never ending series of heatwaves mixed with perimenopause and it makes for a very exhausted Cyn with almost no creative juice left. The problem is that when you are a commercial artist and sell on print-on-demand platform, you've got to keep that algorithm gods happy. Ignore a platform too long, and you'll see a decline in sales. It's a delicate balancing act : self care and staying productive even when you don't have the energy to create anything innovative. That's when filler patterns and working on new color variations come to the rescue! Especially when it comes to creating fabric and wallpaper patterns for Spoonflower.

Hero patterns are all great and awesome, but not everything you create has to make a big splash, or demand hours of your time. Simple stripes, polka dots and checkerboard patterns aren't only great to tie a collection together, they also have the power to save the day and your workflow when you don't have the energy to plan and create something more complex. What's more you never really need to create something new entirely from scratch with filler patterns.

You can simply work from an existing template or master tile file from your asset library, pick a new color palette and recolor the whole thing in Photoshop or Affinity designer. Just a few clicks, and you could add a dozen variation of stripes and checkers to your list of files to publish in just a few minutes, giving you 2-3 weeks of consistent uploading pace on PoD. You could also take an older hero pattern, and revisit it with a new colorway, and then take some of your filler templates to make a matching support pattern at a fraction of the effort of creating a whole new design from scratch. When you are a commercial artist and surface pattern designer, it's all about working smarter instead of harder. Generally speaking, I always find that the May to July period is a slow one in the industry. If you have planned things well, your new summer themed designs have all wrapped up by the beginning of May, and the Halloween and autumn themed design can start going live by the end of July, so you have a few weeks of rest you can use to practice self care and focus on uploading simpler and more generic evergreen patterns while you recharge your creative batteries in time for the festive season with the added advantage that several of those simple geometric patterns can do wonderful fillers for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, so the slow season is the perfect occasion to play with new color palettes even if all you have in term in energy is 30 minutes a day before you need to move to something less demanding again. We artists are humans, not robots, and it's our superpower, that's where our creativity comes from. Never forget it and stop thinking you need to be mega productive all the time.