You know a lot of hard work goes into making surface patterns. From brainstorming the themes to building them into perfect tiles, your patterns are surely something you must show to the world!

You want to post them on Instagram, but it feels boring to just show the final design in a flat JPG. Well, there are many other ways you can leverage your hard work designing patterns as rich social media content. In fact, I’ve got 5 ways you can do that!

1. Sketch vs Final

Many patterns starts with a messy sketch. Sketches are rough by nature, and some artists hesitate to share their so-called ‘ugly’ versions of art! No matter how ugly you feel your sketches may be, that’s the whole point! Sketches show how such a complex pattern comes to life from simple scribbles.

This is a good way to engage your audience in showing how a pattern comes along from a rough sketch. 

You could present it in a video or a carousel that shows both your sketch and final pattern. It also gives you a chance to show potential clients a peek into your design process so don’t shy away from showing how it all begins. The difference between your sketch and final can be fascinating enough, if you let it be! 

2. Share Your Pattern Tiling

You know that satisfaction when your pattern is almost done. And if you use Procreate the last step is to duplicate the layers and start forming smaller tiles of it – I find it very rewarding! I’ve seen artists showing this final step many times in a video and it always keeps my attention. 

Once your first tile is done and you’ve saved your files, try screen grabbing or recording your pattern-making. Try not to rush with it, just do a slow action of duplicating your pattern into four different layers and adjust them into a fuller pattern.

Don’t worry about making it perfect; it could be a very simple video that can turn eyes onto your work in a more interesting way. 

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Related Article: Optimizing Instagram for SEO: A Guide for Artists

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3. Make Reels Showing Timelapse

As we know, video content is an important way to reach a wider audience on Instagram. While we are artists and certainly not content creators, every once in a while, I feel like we could try our hands at it. In the previous two points, I mentioned filming parts of your pattern-making process. But if you have the bandwidth, how about you document your process right from the beginning? 

Let me share a low-stress way to do it. Instead of trying to change camera angles, fix just one angle where your device is visible and start a timelapse video. That way a pattern’s lengthy process is sped up and you get to showcase everything from start to finish.

If not a camera, then use your software’s timelapse recording setting. Turn it on and simply continue with your pattern-making. You could easily screengrab a lot of your process that may not be usually shared with your audience. 

After it’s filmed, edit it into a reel format by adding a border around the timelapse with descriptive text or better yet, a voiceover! I know these things may be tedious or out of your comfort zone, but it can be good to mix this up and make our feeds more versatile by doing something different.

4. Showing Colorways to Upscale Engagement

Changing color palettes is one easy way of repurposing your artwork. Some may prefer green over pink and that’s normal. Our patterns get printed on products that people with varying color preferences purchase. Your pattern could be the best in the crowd, but if your pattern is selling only on a pink bed sheet over a green, well you just lost a client! You don’t have to make a whole rainbow out of your pattern, but just provide a minimum of two and a maximum of five colorways of one pattern. 

What this does is it opens doors to a wider range of customers. Think about it: when you want to buy a home decor item that you like but doesn’t match your aesthetic at home, you tend to skip it. But when there are multiple colors of that item, it makes us happy to find the one that suits our needs. 

Similarly, after you’re done creating the pattern, open another file with only the pattern elements (keep the safe files separate), and experiment with colors. Floral patterns, for example, do well with colorways, as compared to let’s say, a flamingo. Traditionally a flamingo is pink, but you could try changing the colors of the elements around it, or even make things funky by making the flamingo blue. Who knows, that could be your way of standing out! 

Better yet, you could share all these colorways in your stories or posts and add a poll asking your audience which pattern they lean towards more. It helps you to see which colorway responds best to people’s eyes. 

5. Manifest with Mockups

The art of manifestation is to simply believe that you can achieve something just by working intentionally towards it while accepting that whatever you desire is going to potentially happen. It may sound woo-woo to many but trust me, I have seen many artists manifest their dream clients, including myself. But let me share a fascinating way of doing it: with mockups!

Before our patterns get selected to be licensed or sold to a company, a simple visual representation can help us figure out whether it is going to work well in the market or look good or not.

You can find free mockups or buy them from design marketplaces and see if your patterns work. Mockups help us visualize our patterns onto objects and this visual representation can help you manifest your dream client because you are sharing it. Which product do you want your pattern to be sold on? Find the mockup online and add your pattern to it. 

Several artists who have had their dream clients choose a popular brand. Then, they simply share mockups of their art online and discuss how their pattern works for that product and express their goal of working with the client!

Even if your work does not get licensed to that big company, a smaller company could see better potential in you. 

It takes hard work to be discovered, but give your best shot at conceptualizing a pattern collection and put it out there in the world and manifest it. My example for this isn’t a pattern, but I wanted to have my illustration on products for a big candle company. Turns out, a small business saw my work and commissioned me to design their candles! It works, my art friends! 

Alright then, I hope you are geared up to choose at least one of these five ways to feature your pattern designs on Instagram. Please know that your art and thinking skills deserve to be recognized by people most creatively so that you are appreciated and well-paid for your pattern-making abilities! Go out there and show off your pattern superpower from start to finish.

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