Bulletin

Watercolor patterns of Tiina Taivainen

Published: 09/10/2020

Tiina Taivainen’s Poppies pattern family consists of three watercolor patterns – Myfair, Poppypath and Leafy. These patterns have both bright colorways as well as vintage-like worn out colors.

Poppies have always been somewhat mysterious flowers to Tiina. They take her to a dream world or to a fairytale. It may come from their name in Finnish language, which is “Unikko”. In the beginning of the word there is another word “uni”, which means “dream” in Finnish.

Tiina’s first memory of poppies comes from her childhood and from a children’s book. In the book there was a tiny girl with skirt made of poppy flower. This is always Tiina’s first vision when a poppy flower is mentioned.

Tiina gets often inspired by techniques, but most of all she loves to work with watercolors and design watercolor patterns. Supposedly an irrelevant line or sketch may become a starting point for a new pattern. The initial idea for poppies came when she was doing random sketching with marker pens. A thin marker line resembled her of a delicate poppy flower. The process began by drawing poppies with markers but ended up with watercolors.

Leafy is the small-scale pattern in this pattern family. It is also suitable for wallpapers. “In a way it represents my personality and me as a designer: in one hand everything is in neat order and on the other hand inside the order there is a lot of irregularities and imperfections. :)”, say Tiina