Where the flock first took flight.
Birds of a Flamin' Feather was my first complete surface pattern collection, created during Bonnie Christine's Immersion 2025 course. At the time, I was completely new to Adobe Illustrator. I wasn't just learning how to build a collection. I was learning how to create motifs, construct repeating patterns and somehow persuade all those little anchor points to behave.
It started, as so many of my ideas do, with photographs.
PHotography → first illustrations
The collection began with something I already loved: photographing the world around me.
Australian native birds have always fascinated me. They're colourful, diverse, noisy, elegant, cheeky and occasionally ridiculous, often all at once. I had photographs of birds and gum blossoms taken locally and while travelling around Australia, with friends and family generously adding some of their own photographs to the growing inspiration pile.
The first bird I appear to have drawn was a King Parrot, its outline created in Procreate before being brought into Illustrator. From there, the idea began to grow. Birds gathered. Gum blossoms appeared. And what had started as a little creative bud slowly became my first planned collection.
From lens to line
The meaningful photographs + gum blossoms
Some of the photographs carry stories of their own. The Fairy Wren and Rosella were photographed during a particularly meaningful trip. We travelled first to Mt Kosciuszko to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of scattering my Dad's ashes there, before continuing on to Bright for a few quiet days of sightseeing and relaxation. Those birds became more than reference photographs. They became small pieces of a memory carried forward into the collection.
The gum blossoms were there from the beginning too. I loved the relationship between Australia's brilliantly coloured birds and the soft, feathery flowers of the eucalypts, and they became the thread that connected the flock.
Two photographs. One very special journey.
Enter: Illustrator chaos
Of course, creating my first collection involved rather more trial and error than that tidy description suggests.
Birds were redrawn. Colours were adjusted. Leaves and flowers were rebuilt. Then rebuilt again.
One particularly enthusiastic decision involved drawing an enormous branch of gum leaves and blossoms essentially as one illustration, only to discover that I really needed individual sprigs and motifs. So I got to enjoy the character-building exercise of pulling the whole thing apart again.
And then there was Glorious Gum Nuts.
That pattern went through around six major iterations as I adjusted placement, reduced colours, corrected details and found yet another tiny thing that needed fixing. Its final version wasn't completed until February 2026, roughly nine months after I first began the collection.
At one point, I also discovered that some mysterious pattern fills had somehow found their way into strokes or fills buried among what felt like a billion objects in my Illustrator layers. Eventually, starting again from the original motifs became considerably more appealing than hunting down every culprit.
Not exactly elegant.
But very educational.
A few redraws, several rebuilds and approximately one billion Illustrator layers later…
Looking at Birds of a Flamin' Feather now, there are certainly things I would approach differently. My skills have grown, my process has changed and I understand pattern design in ways I simply couldn't when I began.
But that's exactly why this collection matters to me.
I can see the beginnings of my creative voice in it. The love of nature and storytelling. The photography becoming illustration. The fondness for tiny details. The colour. The characters. And, perhaps most recognisably, the sass.
Birds of a Flamin' Feather isn't simply my first finished collection.
It's where Vintage Pug Mamma first began to sound like me.
