Swatch Books

We just did a project where we were to design a series of three related paper swatch book covers. The theme was plants and the typography was to work with any supporting images.

I have to first show some gorgeous swatch books that French Paper has put together...

My three covers:

In a paper store I saw a stamp that looked like a very intricate flower. Upon closer inspection I saw it was actually a doily.  I thought this was a brilliant way to create an abstract image of a flower and then play around with size and placement. I scanned three different doilys and then did a live trace in Illustrator. There is no transparency on these, but you still get an illusion of this with the optical blending of colors.