Paintbrush Wildflower Pattern

Paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa) is one of my favorite wildflowers, so I made a surface pattern design based on it. My original thought was to fill the space between the full flower motifs with small elements of leaves and petals, as shown in the second and third image, but I ended up liking the simpler one better.

The dotted lines on the third image indicate the folds I used in order to ensure a seamless repeat (a technique I learned from Polina Oshu, https://polinaoshu.com/)

One technique I was exploring with Illustrator for this project was applying an effect to only part of an object by duplicating, applying the effect to the duplicate, then merging the duplicate and the original with the pathfinder unite.

Another technique was generating similar but distinct elements, which I used for the leaves and the petals. I created a base element, duplicated into a grid, and then applied light effects to columns/rows of the grid.