Month: June 2020

The main task I wanted to do today was creating the hero design, or at least some ideas for it so I have something prepared for a tutorial. The idea for the hero was to make sure that there was a variety of poses in the dormouse so there was variation to look at across the pattern. I also wanted to design a placement piece of the animal as I thought it could be quite interesting for the front of a notebook or something like that. I think this would be quite effective as long as it is well drawn and bold.

I created a variety of poses for the dormouse, I think particularly the bright eyes made it look good. Overall I think these worked well in terms of colouring and shapes too because there is a lot of difference in the shapes and forms with the tail especially.

I first created this full drop repeat tile, using all the different dormouse poses that I could. I started with a white design which I think does look good and makes the colours stand out, I know I have some options in the secondaries and blenders I have already done that are white as well but I think my hero needed to be colourful. I tried pink as it is a main colour in this part of the collection, I also tried the green and I think the natural dormouse colourings stood out from this a lot better. I then rolled with this and added some dots, and then also some blobs in the background which call back to experimenting with texture. I tried this in a yellow too because this is also a key colour in this part of the collection, although I think is it used a little less than the green and pink.

On the note of colourings, my idea for the collection at the moment is that I want to add a few shades of blue to the colour scheme, which will help me to differ between the various animal collectives within this large collection. I thought about maybe making one colour each be the obvious dominant colour for each animal, but I just felt like this was quite restrictive, so by adding blue to the scheme I could use three dominant colours for each little animal collection. So actually each colour will be in three out of four of the collections, so they all will tie together, but the mixture of the three colours in each set will set it a little apart from the other animals.

So the dormouse is green, pink and yellow. Looking at the motifs and what types of things I want to include in each, I put the hare down as green, yellow and blue (lighter shades of blue to keep the green as the dark powerful one) and then the squirrel with pink, yellow and blue (blue in darker shades to be the powerful dark colour here) and then finally the hedgehog in green, pink and blue, which I think will be really interesting.

I put them into repeat here to get the idea of them and I think they are cute, I think because the animals are the main point of it, they do stand out a little in the repeat. I thought about trying a half drop for the hero design because it is an important one and the repeat being less obvious I think would be better.

I went through the half drop process from my full drop tile and shown here is a larger scale and a smaller scale design. I think these look quite fun and shows a variety of the dormice and a good colour balance across them.

I used some of my favourite motifs here to create some fun secondary designs. I can see these working really well on the stationary ideas that I have and also fabric products such as giftware, a makeup pouch or a pencil case. I also think these designs do look modern, in my tutorial before I started any real designing we discussed my target market being 25-30 year olds and I was advised to maybe age it up a little because they may turn out as quite classic designs, which I think I understood if I had gone with a natural colour palette completely like I did with some of the fabric stitched experiments. I think these do suit the age group that I was aiming for though with the inclusion of the bright colours and the dots seem to make it more modern looking too. I like busy designs and I think this is definitely my kind of handwriting with design. Throughout my Spoonflower challenges too you can see I go for a busy design and I think these have worked well for me.

Finally today I experimented with a placement design, that I imagine on a notebook or even an art print. I think if I was going for a print I would keep it very minimal or maybe go with one of the borders, however for a notebook I also think the faded dotty design behind the dormouse is a cute one that would work well. I thought the leaf trails around it in the corners would work but they do just look just disjointed from the design and I prefer the dots that tie it into the rest of the collection by using the colours, as the white background here is different to the hero but does tie in with some white backgrounds I used throughout my little collection.

On the subject of borders I did try out some border designs, I imagined it going down the side of a notebook page or even on a cover.

I do quite like the effect of these and I will look into doing more of these throughout the other collections I do.

So on the note of other things to try, I think a proper stripe would be interesting and different, and some other border designs, like maybe a two sided one that would rotate and form a circle in the middle. I think I could also use this dot idea to form a stripe too.

I began working with the mushrooms and found that they were very fun to work with and I kept just finding other ideas to work with. I explored texture with the mushrooms, particularly the kind of weird uneven patterns on the top, and some that were spotted, and this was something I knew I wanted to work more with this.

I wanted to make these quite bright and fun patterns and experimented a lot with scales and colourways, backing textures and motif sizes. I had a lot of fun with these and just carried on finding new little things to do and I wanted to give myself a lot of choice because these will probably only represent one or two patterns out of the whole 30 part collection. Although like my Spoonflower collections, I only need to make one pattern but giving myself that little challenge of going further and creating a whole little set from it is good practice for me. I also want to set a lot of time apart to edit my collection and really decide what I want for the best possible combination and representation of my work.

I also created a set of blenders, using the textures that I was taking from the mushrooms in a number of different colourways and combinations within this. I quite enjoyed doing these too as I think they do look pretty and I could picture them working well with other designs.

Finally I printed these out to check the colours because my laptop looks so so different than printed or even my ipad. I think this is important to make sure I like the colours. I considered that my greens are a little bright, but I know I also liked muted colours, and I have been surprising myself lately with brighter colours and how much I actually like them.

I printed them out and had quite the collection here of blenders, secondaries and a couple of possible heroes for the mushrooms. I think it would depend on where I wanted the mushrooms to be represented in the collection as to what kind of pattern I will use from these sets eventually, or whether I develop even more from these.

I wanted to explore colourways a lot and these show a few examples of this, just showing some of the main background colours changing and how they look with each one and seeing how the colours work together. Sometimes I would change the colours of the dots or squiggles too but primarily I used these to add some contrast back into the work too, so a green background pattern with yellow and green mushrooms would have pink dots.

I also experimented with different backgrounds by trying different sizes of dots and squiggles, looking at regular repeats and seeing what these looked like, I do not like the ones with the even repeats behind them as I think they just look textured. I prefer the uneven dots that I add in myself with even pattern, the same with the little squiggles.

Lastly, the main experiment was scale where I went from the actual tile I used to make the seamless repeat, then a large scale repeat and a smaller scale repeat. I think these worked well actually in the different scales. If I had to choose what scale to use to put it on something maybe like a small pencil case I would probably use the middle one for wanting to see the different motifs. But I do think the bottom one would work too as more of a coloured pattern to look busier.

As I am working from home and sometimes limited with my choices in fabrics, I wanted to try and dye my own using my garden materials. My garden had been such an influence on my designs that I thought it would be a great idea to try and use the natural materials there to create the dyes. I wanted to create greens especially because I could not really find any berries or anything that would create a pink colour. So I tried a nettle pot, and a grass pot too, which did not really go too well.

The nettle one smelt awful, and even after a good few days I could not really get the colour out of it to make any difference to the fabric, the same happened with the grass, the water got a little coloured but did not impact on the plain linen at all.

I added more nettles and boiled for longer, tried a few things, I was not very precise with the original recipe so this may have had an impact on it. I ordered a dylon packet anyway in a lovely natural colour so I decided to give this a go instead.

The colour produced was quite a natural earthy green which I do like, but also my collection is a little brighter than this so maybe I should have tried a more tropical kind of green too to see the difference, which I think I would have done if I had more time with this project. I did try out some tie dye techniques however to test the idea of the texture into the cloth, and I think I could work with bleach and how it reacts to the newly dyed surface as well.

I cannot believe that I forgot to properly cover flowers in my book, I did a couple of them and then I rearranged my photos, put them safe and forgot about fifty flower photographs that I had tucked away. I decided to start some markmaking and studies from them in my secondary book and explore the shapes and colours from the photographs that I took mostly in my own garden.

I enjoyed the watercolour experiments and playing with shade and contrast, although I think I preferred doing the things like the mushrooms and the berries. I do not think the flowers would be a huge part of the designs, just a small elements of some of them. So I think I am ready to take some ideas forward to Procreate now and see how things work there.