I was created to create

I feel that the church street designs fit best on home ware products as the architecture is something in which would be featured in a home especially with a design of your home town onto it.  I placed on a phone case i thought the image is fitting onto it and allows you to see the full image and always have a part of your town to show around. 

After looking at images of different sea creatures i decided to focus on the dolphin and octopus as i thought those are the creatures in which are affect the most by the ocean. It doesn’t have the shock factor of the plastics within the designs but if i was to further develop these ideas i would add to tug on heartstings of people who would be viewing my work by adding in plastic bags, bottles, plastic can holders and other products which people don’t recycle and end up throwing away. As i asked people around they said my sketches would work well on a variety of different things as they are basic images but do have a lot of detail within them which don’t need to be coloured. I applied them to a range of products in which i would be able to sell if i were to open up my own pop up store or stand. 

with this project we worked with the choice of creating an art piece to go into the Lumiere light festival in Durham. We had the choice to create an art installation or design some images in which could be used on tshirts, prints, cards, collectors gifts. The theme for the idea was working on around the ocean. all the plastic pollution what is in the ocean affecting all the animals in there. It would make people aware and bring light into the situation. 

I am looking into progression onto the third year of University at Sunderland studying Graphic Design. 

Fashion - Socks, Suit linen, Silk handkerchief 

Homeware - Cups, Towels, cushions 

I started to mess around with layout of patterns seeing which the patterns worked best with the structure. I found that a lot of the images worked best if they were just randomly placed together so you could piece them like a puzzle rather than having them as a grid. But i found that some would be best to change to the grid style layout as the pattern looked too heavy and clumped together. 

Taking the ice creams which i had previously sketched out and coloured, i digitally coloured them to make them more professional but as i used the grid method to create the pattern i found there was too much space between the images. So i used the same method as before of cutting out the shapes outline and only using that really faint so you can’t see it from distance but as you look closer you see the outlines of the ice creams, this makes the pattern not look as clustered together even if there isn’t much space there at all. It plays with your eyes. 

Digitally underpainting the logo for middleton grange gave a professional and neat finish, coloured pencils which i previously used showed the lines in where i had been colouring and the colours werent as vibrant as they should of been. I decided i wanted to stick to the colours in which the logo was originally. To design this i rotated and flipped the image around so they would slot in together and become a mirrored imaged pattern which could then be repeated into bigger chunks of the pattern itself. The white background worked the best as it made the colours stand out and appear more eye catching, this is the colour they had used on the logo itself on the side of the buildings to be able to see from distance. The colours on the background dont make it as appealing as you seem to lose some of the colours vibrancy 

Combining the two main aspects in which people relate to Hartlepool i didn’t want to use something in which was really obvious, i wanted to go for something in which would be unique and more on the creative side. I played around with the footprints of the two animals and placed them together side by side as if they were forming into one thing. These make you think to what they are because as you look closer the shape and detail come more into view. The backgrounds were too pale for the stag footprints to stand out against, you would have to look really close to be able to see, but i thought the blue colours looked nice, similar to the way it looked with the antler pattern wanting to keep the colour scheme going through out each of my designs. 

 I didn’t want to do the typical stag head as i thought there would be a lot of things with that design on and i didn’t want to make it look too similar to the monkey, so i decided to take a certain part of the stag, the antlers, which i thought were the more obvious link to them and would work for a pattern within itself. Using the grid method i figured out the right places i needed to put the image so it was able to fit together and be repeated down, leaving the same amount of space between each one. I didn’t want a flat basic colour for the antlers as i thought it would look too plain when there is quite a bit of detail within them. So i took a texture of an image of bones, which antlers are made and placed it on top of the illustration in which i designed, shaping and erasing the parts in which i dont need to create a textured image, turning the opacity down so the image was able to blend without seeing any of the lines. I stuck with the colour pallette of having the colours previously used and thought the pastel colours worked best on these designs as the antlers themselves are quite dark so seem to blend in with the darker colours. I decided to go with the pale blue colour as i thought it is a link to Hartlepool colouring still and links together with the monkey head pattern being on white, giving that Hartlepool team colours when seen together. 

Taking the monkey head which i had previously i wanted to create more of a sophisticated pattern rather than something which is child like and wanted to appeal to the adult audience. I stripped the colours from the background and just placed on a plain white background and made the monkey head smaller so you could fit more onto the pattern to be able to repeat the way it had went. I lined them up to make sure they were all even and in the same structure so where ever you move it too it would always be the same and repeat itself. I tried with two different colour blue backgrounds and thought the pastel colours worked best as you could see the image stand out whereas the darker blue was too dark and you began to lose the image completely. I then tried incorporating the Hartlepool football colours with the stripes in which i changed from the squares and thought this worked a little bit better but the background took all focus from what the pattern was supposed to be and started to look like a pattern within itself. I think the white plain background works best to be able to put onto products as it looks neat and professional and doesn’t distract you from the pattern itself. 

As i took the monkey head and coloured it on photoshop i saw that it was more cartoon effect rather than a real life looking monkey, which i thought would be more suitable towards younger audience such as children, but also would attract adults as it is one of the biggest symbols of Hartlepool. First i tried colouring the monkey in the Hartlepool football club colours, white and blue to symbolise the mascot, but i thought it didn’t work too well as it was too obvious what it was and wasn’t what i was going for, it didn’t look professional and feel it would work best on a stripe background rather than in squares. After i realised that didn’t work i started to colour them in different colours, keeping the same colour palette through out of the colours of Hartlepool. As i started to colour these it reminded me of the Pop art movement which Andy Warhol created putting characters/people on coloured squares with contrasting colours as the main focus. As i played around with the colours, i thought these were more appealing to the younger audience as they were vibrant and vivid colours which would attract the eye of the products to them. Going from that i thought maybe there was too much colour on them and too much to look at so i wanted to try colouring the monkey with a normal colour of what the orginal should be and found it worked better as the coloured squared backgrounds made the image stand out completely and nothing got lost within the background or the colours didn’t blend together too much. 

i wanted to try a different technique in which i wouldn’t normally try. I cut the shape from a potato of a triangle from the HCFE logo wanting to create a geometric shape pattern. I kept the colours of the logo of the college so it kept with the correct colour palette so you can easily identify where the inspiration came from. I used ink and Paint but i found that the ink didn’t show the colour as much as i liked too and the paper seemed to absorb into it, whereas the acrylic paint was thicker and didn’t soak into the paper so the colours seemed to work more vibrant. The worn out effect linked to the industrial style to old hartlepool in which people liked about the town to show that link as it wasn’t just a new/modern place and that it had a lot of history. 

The layout of the patterns i chose were random or checkered board structured as i thought these were the easiest two to be able to create a complete repeat pattern. being able to flip/rotate the images around to piece together. 

As i took photographs around Hartlepool, i picked the main parts of each photo on what i liked and drew them in illustration style with just basic detail wanting to keep them simple so they would be easy to make a pattern with. I figured just creating the outline of the images allowed me to change the colours and would stand out instead of getting too lost in the details. Having just the illustration wasn’t very effective as it was just one colour and the outline was too thin so it wouldn’t really stand out on anything. 

Going from the Facebook comments from the public of Hartlepool, i went around different places of Hartlepool after making a list of what the people had commented. I took this into consideration as i tried to take a photo of each object. Headland, Seaton, Church Street, Town Centre were the main areas in which people had the fondest memories of. I got a variety of photographs, and close ups of the details in various architecture.