Observing all my work in the 1-1 session was very useful; overall it has good variety of motifs and use of colour, forming a good base. Most of my designs are placement and large scale; to improve them I will consider use of space and scale, and demonstrate how each motif would be repeated in a final design, as most interiors designs are made in repeat. I should also adopt a looser approach to design and composition.
Sometimes I find it challenging to visualise the end result in terms of composition for wallpaper designs while I am working, as the size of a wallpaper roll is so much larger than my laptop screen. This may be part of the reason that I wasn't including enough variety when it came to composition in prior designs. To solve this I could zoom in and out constantly while working on Photoshop to get a good view of the bigger picture, but this seems inefficient. Determining which product I am designing for would help determine scale in advance, and would enable me to work in repeat from the beginning if the product was wallpaper.
After Christmas, I realised that over-thinking composition had made my designs too similar. To combat this I worked at a faster pace, and in repeat from the outset, producing a repeatable tile. I then put four of these tiles together in an A1 document, to approximate the width of a wallpaper roll. This technique I developed was successful; the resulting designs were superior in terms of variation in mood, scale, colour and movement. The tile can be modified if I'm not happy with the repeat and the process forced me to think about scale more carefully.
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| Simple Tile (Left) and Repeat (Right) with hand drawn motifs |
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| More complicated Tile (Left) and Repeat (Right) with adapted photographic brickwork |
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| Complicated Tile (Left) and Repeat (Right) with photographic flower elements |
I'm now happy with this wallpaper collection, so will focus on screen printing motifs onto paper, adding background texture (from existing drawings and photographs) with paint and experimenting with foreground texture using foil and flock.
