Luna Collection: Drawing & Painting for Textile design
The Project: A collection of 3 original prints with motifs and coloring based off of the cosmos and astrology. This originated as an assignment for the Drawing & Painting for Textile Design course at Central Saint Martins and was since expanded into the more fully realized pieces shown here. Elements were to include a mood-board, stamps, motifs around a central theme, and finally a mini-collection of 2-5 fully executed patterns.
The Process: As artists it's so easy to fall into the same methods and patterns of creating. It's always so much fun when a brief pushes you to try new techniques and really slow down and experiment. With a degree in Graphic Design I find myself extremely comfortable in the digital sphere. This time, I was challenged to work more in the traditional before translating into something more final. I didn't touch a tablet or a computer for the first 3 weeks of the course- and that has to be a record for me! I didn't realize how static my purely digital work could feel until I was stretched to stay in traditional mediums for so long.
Moodboard: Many of my previous surface pattern designs were heavily focused around natural or floral themes so for this assignment I wanted to push myself to create work that went farther and had a different vibe than I'd previously created. It began with me creating a Pinterest board where I collected all the images in my feed that aesthetically captured me over the course of a week. Surprisingly, what I felt sure was a random collection of images when I began, had a very cohesive vibe in terms of coloring and symbols when I saw them all together. Immediately I saw this softer, sort of astrology based theme coming together.
Our fourth week of the course our instruction was to create stamps based around our motifs. This sounded intimidating at first but the only materials needed were an X-acto knife and craft foam and something strong to be the base. Creating the stamps became a fun, easy, and new way for me to test my motifs before spending too much time on detail work or digital translation.
Hand lettering is something I've been working on becoming stronger at and I was curious if I could make some sort of text work in a pattern design. I think it could really work as embroidery. I could see the letters and constellations working really well stitched out delicately in thread. And of course I would find the perfect words in Stephen Hawking.
