Taking a Trip to the Ideal Home Show

In order to try and gain a little more inspiration for my project, I took a little trip down to London to visit the Ideal Home show with Emma. She'd been a few years ago and said it was a really great experience, we both work within an interior market, so I thought it would probably be a great why with me too! Although I was really excited and thought it'd be this amazing place, filled with wallpaper and luxury and beautiful pieces, I was very disappointed when I got there to see that this was not the majority, and actually quite lot of it was garden furniture and hot tubs, lighting and kitchen surfaces (something that would be very helpful for Emma who is working with ceramic tiles at the moment). I was still very glad that we went though, even if it wasn't as helpful as it thought. There wasn't any wallpaper companies there, nor anything of the like, but there was some furniture companies that had wallpaper books, that we papers they had used to decorate their stand. Again, I found a lovely sample book with lovely subtle metallics and glass beaded designs. Something I'm beginning to notice is that a lot of the wallpapers that I'm looking at are more simple, designs, perhaps that have come from a more detailed drawings, but they're now just silhouettes or textured shapes. Do I need to take my work more in this direction in order to fit into the market better? 

As well as this find on a furniture stall, there was a lot of great room set ups that could inspire how I connect my work in the future? Usually I would just fill a blank white room with my designs, but I think I'm going to attempt to build my own context image, so we'll see how that goes. This experience also got me a little more used to the way of London, and how to get across the city. I'd really like to do this more in future, at the moment I can get quite anxious in London, especially on the tube. Sometimes I'm fine but other times, normally when it's busier, I can have panic attacks and fits of tears when I'm down there. This is something I really want to try and get over, mainly because I'd love my career to take me to London in the future, it's the best place to be, but I can't be there if I'm panicking all the time. 

Combining the Hand Printed with the Digital Drawings

So after much thought and being rather undecided about how I should use the A1 prints that I made, I decided to scan them in (very tedious, having to can them in quarters and put them together on photoshop, but I got there in the end) and then make come more collages using some of my hand drawn and digital designs over the top. I had to fix the colours a little bit, metallics don't scan very well, but equally, creating them in photoshop didn't help either, as they look a little flat. I wasn't really sure how to work with these and feel I was trying to combine too many techniques into one thing and lost my flow a little bit, they all feel quite imbalanced and the  only one I'm really happy with is the one on the far right, however I feel like this is far too busy for a wallpaper. I know that this will lead to something good in the future of my project, I can feel something developing but I just haven't put my finger on it yet. 

Technical Drawing in Adobe Illustrator

So throughout the project so far, I've been attempting to translate my inspiration into a style that I'm not so familiar with: technical drawing. I chose this style because I wanted to work with a little more restriction, but also just to expand my portfolio and perfect something new over the course of this unit. However, after a group crit I realised that if I wanted my drawings to be accurate, I needed to start making use of the technology that I have around me, because even though when I'm drawing by hand I am trying to measure them so precisely, sometimes they do come up a little off. So it was suggested that I started working in Adobe Illustrator and using the accuracy the programme has to offer, in order to perfect my drawings. I started off just experimenting with the tools, and watching a few youtube tutorials, and then I began to translate pieces of jewellery I'd seen in the antique stores into this technical style. 

This definitely improved the look of my drawings, giving them a much sharper aesthetic but I'm a bit unsure on the outcome, they've lost a lot of the detail that my hand drawn pieces have, so I need to look into this in future and find away around it.

Large Scale

After seeing Yasmin working on a piece of fabric the same size as the print table, I was inspired to work a bit bigger (although not quite full table)! I'd become so used to working on my laptop or drawing very tightly with my fineliner, and after getting messy with textures on a scannable size of A3, I decided it was time to go a little bigger! I bought some A1ish cold pressed printing paper from the Uni Shop, as I'd worked on this once before in second year, and adored the way the prints came out. I wanted to work in a similar way as to how I'd produced my digital collages, separating the paper off in an angular fashion and then filling these sections with different textures. I tried to mix up some similar colours that I'd worked with in photoshop, some were Metallic Binder, Some Opaque and one Gloss Binder. I wanted there to be a range of finishes within these pieces, I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do with them yet, I just wanted to have fun today.

It was daunting at first, I'm not used to starting with such a large white space, but once I got into it, it just came naturally. They might not seem very detailed, but a lot of thought went into the texture and layering of these pieces and working with different surfaces is something I'd like to focus on more in the weeks to come!

Colour Separation

Usually when I'm using photoshop to produce digital work, I use a lot of layer effects and rarely have a set colour scheme, so this time around this is something I wanted too escape from! I began to separate my designs into layers based on the layers in my drawings and then chose some colours that I'd had in mind of working with, adding a metallic layer to all three colour schemes! I just used magicwand tool to do this, however in the future I think I should build the design in layers and do it this way, to speed up the process and also make it a littler easier. I should also probably refresh my memory on AVA, this is what they would use in industry and a lot of the jobs I've seen advertised have this as a requirement.

The design below was more of a struggle to separate, and I had to split it into really disgusting, contrasting colours to do so, it just kept messing up. Even more reason why I need to start using AVA, although I did get there in the end! 

Beginning to Construct Repeats

Previously in my blog I mentioned that when I first started to put repeats together, I felt it was a little too soon. They had a rather blocky feel about them, quite like a tiled print and that just wasn't what I wanted to go for. Now with my newer paintings, I wanted to try again; this time hoping for more of a flowing repeat and hoping that putting them into a half drop will make them less boxy. 

In the image on the left I adapted the painting of the ring, making a more balanced pattern. Taking the circular elements from the top left side makes the design less crowded, but by moving them to the bottom, almost reflecting the top diagonally, creates a flowing element in the designs. It connects the largest circles with one another, through a pattern of smaller circles that will move the eye up and across the design when it is hung on the walls of a home. I layered over the technical lines here to add a little more depth and connect the shapes once more, also to reveal to the audience a stage of my design process (one of the secrets in my labyrinth). 

The second design on the right was made by mirroring my original art deco I inspired painting to reveal a design slightly more sophisticated than the previous. This looks most like a wallcovering you could find in shops, in my opinion. At the moment it only properly repeats vertically, I wanted to see what they would look like side by side in a half drop repeat - if this were put onto a screen to repeat on a length or wallpaper, I would simply crop them image down the centre of each strip, this would then work in repeat like it should. I believe this design is so successful because there is no obviois start or end point, which is really my intention for all the designs in my final collection. The circle design and diamond in the centre connect the other shapes, thus creating a flow as the eye travels down the pattern. However, one improvement that I think is needed is to add some colour into the central diamond, as is in the circle, because at the moment I think it just looks a little empty and disrupts the design slightly. 

These are just using the colours from the original paintings. One of the things I mentioned in my portfolio chat was showing more colour ways in my work, and also to showcase my ability to separate colour within a design, so stay tuned for that! 

Pecha Kucha