From sketch to swatch: how a Gather No Moss kids’ print gets made

Prints in our kidswear collection often start not on a screen, but on paper. Here’s what actually happens between a first sketch and a finished, production-ready print.

It starts with an idea, not a trend report. Kidswear print design begins with a character or a story: an animal, a scene, a mood, a colour combination that feels playful rather than a gap identified in a trend forecast. Our designers sketch loosely and quickly at this stage, rough ideas for every one that goes further because the best kids’ prints usually have a spontaneity that’s hard to manufacture if you overthink it too early.

Then it’s inked, painted scanned or digitally rendered by hand. Once an idea earns a second look, it’s developed properly: inked line work, painted colour studies, or hand-rendered digital illustration, depending on what the print needs. This is the stage where a lot of the character gets locked in, the wobble in a hand-drawn line, the texture in a painted animal’s coat, the details that make a print feel designed rather than generated.

Next, it becomes a repeat. A single illustration isn’t a usable print until it’s been developed into a repeat-ready pattern — tested to make sure motifs don’t awkwardly collide or leave obvious gaps when tiled, and scaled appropriately for the age range it’s designed for. Newborn prints need soft, small-scale, nursery-friendly patterns; tween prints can carry bolder, larger-scale graphics with more attitude. Getting the scale right for the age group is easy to get wrong and important to get right.

Finally, it goes into the collection or is developed specifically to a client’s brief from the start, with colorways and placement adapted to their range. Either way, every kids’ print carries the same hand created foundation, which is a big part of why so many brands like Hallmark, Salt Life, Perry Ellis, The Children’s Place keep coming back to us.

If you’re briefing a kidswear print project and want something built from an original illustration specifically to your specification, we’d love to hear about it.