When I was a teenager, I got to tour Lyndhurst Mansion near Sleepy Hallow, NY and saw the beautiful Star Bedroom (view here), which has a deep blue ceiling with a metallic star print and gold architectural cross sections. I've always wanted to sleep under a ceiling like that. So for this week's design challenge Victorian Floral theme on Spoonflower.com, I was inspired to create a starlight garden with stars and flowering vines in the Victorian Aesthetic Movement (1860-1900) reminiscent of the beautiful wallpapers designed by the Herter Brothers. The interior design of my house growing up was very Victorian-esque, so I've always envision striped florals, like the ones on our wallpaper, little paper boxes, and other ephemera, when thinking of Victorian textiles and wallpaper.
I enjoyed working out how all the little details fit together like a puzzle. I also wanted to create this pattern design as a vector image. Since I've been focusing on pixel-based artwork in Photoshop for quite a while now, my Illustrator skills were a little rusty, but warmed up once I got going. Here is a detail of some of the twists of turns of the florals and stars. The blue flowers are Sweet William (dianthus barbatus), even though they clearly don't grow on vines, and the purple and blue flowers are a sort of double Clematis. I liked how the Sweet Williams sort of repeated the spiky star shape.
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