Meet Ali Baecker

About half a year before I stumbled upon Bonnie's Immersion course (I was a last minute joiner), I had started making repeat patterns myself through block printing and had become obsessed with pattern design. As an engineer and self taught artist, my approach to pattern design is completely by hand with the help of pencil, tracing paper and then in a second step using my hand carved pattern stamps to block print my repeating patterns. While I had seen countless (surface) patterns on products, fabrics and the like, I had no clue how to make patterns digitally or how to get my patterns from paper to repeat seamlessly digitally and from there onto products. Bonnie helped me realise that I could actually do all of this myself with my own patterns - what a revelation and so much fun.  

Taking Immersion helped me learn exactly that, how to get my patterns vectorised and to make them scale. In Immersion I not only loved Bonnie's systematic and thorough teaching style but also having the community of like minded students as well as the possibility to go through the course at my own pace (which I had to do due to my day job). 

The course helped me master Illustrator, going from limited knowledge (of basic functionality before Immersion) to very in-depth Illustrator knowledge. Even more importantly I now was able to get my designs and patterns onto my own products at a larger scale.