New Work     6th Jan 2009

Today I've been putting the finishing touches to a small satellite collection of inkblot-esque designs for the Indigo Textile Collection. A bit like an inkblot, they are horizontally symmetrical, although staring at these pretty pictures will not reveal anything much about your inner psyche, although the intricate hand drawn artwork does contain a plethora of hidden gems, from little dogs, to birds, pirate ships and white rabbits!

With each of these designs I start off by drawing the right hand side of the design, basically everything that will appear to the right of the central axis of symmetry. After much smudging and smearing, I discovered this was the best plan of attack for right handed artists like myself! I try to form the artwork into curving, bulbous shapes, this means the final print will not be a boring strip of pattern, but a more interesting, almost scalloped shape.  I work the motif into a vertical repeat, which involves a bit of tracing paper and a few alterations, to ensure the top of the motif will match up perfectly with the bottom of the previous one when arranged on top of one another.

The pen and ink artwork complete, the half designs are scanned into Photoshop, tided up a bit, cloned and flipped horiztontally, then the two halves lined up to create one perfectly symmetrical whole. Lovely. A bit more cloning and the motifs are positioned on top of one another in perfect repeat to create the final design.

These designs sell to fashion clients looking for an interesting placement print for a garment - imagine a simple t-shirt with the print positioned vertically down the middle, or an asymmetrically cut dress with a large scale version running diagonally across the body.