Creating the Rogue design was really fun, the actual design work for the surface pattern didn't take as long as I thought it would as I got into it pretty fast. I started off by creating an ideas board and colour chart which I never really set in stone, it just gives me a few ideas to work from really.
So here is my design board, I wrote down all the architypes I know of from 5e and tried to come up with items that represented those. I am on purpose not adding dice to my class collections so I really had to think of a lot of items I could draw.
I also give myself some colours or I ask for colour ideas from my Tinker Shed, in this case I did both and came up with a working colour palette which always changes once I start colouring.
COLOUR PALETTE TIP: If you are stuck choosing colours either go on Pinterest and look up some or look through photos that you like the colours of and pick some from the picture.
My next step was drawing up all the items as simple sketches, doesn't matter if I get them wrong because I will be redrawing them anyway. Sometimes if I am struggling with an item I find a photo of one online as a reference or I take photos of what I want and use those.
Here is my basic sketches of the items I wanted to use. After this I tested the colours I had chosen to see what I thought of the design idea so far.
I didn't like the purple and the teal just didn't work so I tweaked, redrew and moved items around until I got what I have now. There was a point in the design when I didn't have the gold and the warm browns and the design just felt cold and flat. On adding these I felt it lift which was great, it suddenly felt warmer and richer but still secretive and sneaky. My favourite part was adding the dotted lines from item to item to indicate some sort of path to follow.
In the end the final design in my opinion is wonderful. I really love the mixture of items and I feel I am learning more with every surface pattern I draw and I hope you like it too.
Lauren