I just spent 2 hours making an Islamic-inspired pattern using my new book

I recently got a copy of Islamic Biomorphic Patterns, Creating Motifs Inspired by the Natural World, by Esra Alhamal.

I have absolutely no experience in this area (my last foray into art books was testing out an animals in watercolour book). At first glance I thought the Islamic patterns book looked quite difficult. It seemed to involve a lot of creating circles and shapes before going on to create highly intricate motifs.

And that is sort of true, but once I got into it, I found creating these patterns in this drawing book to be an enjoyable exercise in mindfulness.

First of all, I needed to create my grid. This consisted of drawing a series of circles and then connecting parts of the circles to draw a six pointed star.

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I then moved on to add some tracing paper over the top of my design and attempted to create a Iznik Floral Hexagonal Tile. This involved drawing a series of flowers and leaves. Mine didn't look exactly like the book, but as the book says, that's ok.

This took me a little while, and at one point I did consider giving up but once I committed to it and settled in I began to find it really relaxing.

I struggled to transfer my design from its tracing paper onto other paper. The book says I should be able to turn it upside down and go over and it would transfer to watercolour paper but this didn't work for me at first.

So I coloured in the tracing paper instead, just to see how it would look using my favourite watercolour pencils (Staedtler's Karat Aquarell set of 60 watercolour pencilsin case you were wondering).

Below is what I was aiming for.

I'm pretty happy with the result, and I'm now keen to try out some different patterns in the book. I've now worked out how to get the tracing paper pattern onto a different bit of paper, it turns out I just needed more force and a darker pencil (see our best pencils list for options).

Overall I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to lose themselves in creating patterns, but not to anyone who lacks patience for doing the same thing over and over again, as creating the repeating patterns is, not surprisingly, repetitive.

You can buy Islamic Biomorphic Patterns by Esra Alhamal from Amazon for $19.50.