Hi! My name is Jere Brooks and I’m a pattern designer living in beautiful Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Pattern and colour influence the way I view the world. I have always seen patterns everywhere! I look for order in chaos and find emotion in the colours of daily life. I love to learn and I’m curious about how things are created and how they function. I have a versatile and evolving style and my inspiration comes from diverse sources – visiting a new place, the angles of a building or colours in reflected water.
I trained as a classical archaeologist and later studied art and design at NSCAD University. Otherwise I’m largely self taught and have always worked in a creative capacity. I’ve been a digital media teacher and producer, a freelance graphic and web designer/programmer, a fashion designer with my own line and a corporate digital media product developer. For the last year I have focused my learning and practice on the textile and surface pattern design world. Being a member of the Textile Design Lab has been a huge part of my journey!
I sometimes use traditional media like acrylics, watercolour, ink and pencil, but my true love is the digital medium. I’ve been using a Mac to make art all of my adult life and it’s truly where I feel most creative and comfortable. Generative Design is my new geeky passion and I’m exploring the possibilities for exciting textile patterns from the coding process. The Encoded and Ice Princess collections shown here are examples.
Generally I start with a mood board that I keep visible as I work. This can be as simple as an inspiring word and a colour I’m loving along with a geometric shape, or sometimes more complex imagery drawn from fashion and design trends. I keep scans of my hand done motifs and digital sketches as I create them and I often go to this “vault” of prior ideas when I start a new design. It’s amazing the body of unfinished work that is just waiting for the right spark! I then define my colour palettes for easy import into Photoshop and Illustrator. I really love to have all my pieces together before I start – colour, mood, motifs, and even generative code I might use. Inevitably, I end up creating more as I go along, but having a solid, organized process allows me to jump into design easily. My best tip is to use the window tiling functions in AI & PS to see all of my designs in a collection on one screen as I work. This allows me to to create cohesiveness and balance in scale and colour.
My goals are to have my own product line of home decor and personal accessories and to find an agent to sell my designs. My other interests are knitwear textiles (I have 2 knitting machines!) and 3D product design. I’m exploring how these interests might intersect with pattern design. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll follow me at the links below!
We are excited to announce that Jere has a new video tutorial available in the Textile Design Lab as part of our Summer of Creativity. The tutorial covers MadPattern templates and how to use them to create repeating tiles to use in Illustrator and Photoshop. Join us in the Lab to check it out!
