I just love high-contrast black and white patterns like these, and have wanted to design one for a while. I spotted these both on ladies’ blouses, and they look so nice on a chiffon or some other light fabric. This one is not quite a tesselation, but it comes pretty close. You could almost flip the sailboat upside down in the negative space to create the same shape in black.

This one is just as lovely. The birds’ legs and long necks break up the black space and create a stripe or almost a herringbone.

So here is my version of a high-contrast black and white pattern. It is kind of okay, but not really there, and part of it might be that this is a flat digital mockup, but still, I thought it was missing something.

I compressed the swans together more, and inverted the overlapping portion. I also added orange beaks.

Here it is again with black beaks. I think this might be getting there. It’s got a different feel than the ones above, but it is better to be inspired by, not to copy, I suppose.