surface dicoreation

For my final pieces for surface decoration I wanted to use a mixture of old and new. I'd been looking at the arts and craft movement for inspiration, as they work with nature. looking at  the artists involved with the moment such as William Morris, Harry Clarke and Maxwell Armfield. William Morris designs are something that I've grown up with but without knowing it, my grandparents had a lot of his pattern designs in their home. What I like about his work is how its mirrored giving it a kind of movement, the leaves twirl round in different directions leading your eye around the pattern.

I wanted to keep the mirrored pattern but make it modern, I'm going to keep the flowers and plants as the focus of my patterns.

I started by taking photos of rock plants and other plants that I would say appeals to younger people. I think that some plants are more popular with younger people, a lot of summer products that are coming out have things like cactus's and are quite graphic. Working from this I wanted to use photography and imagery to make a surface pattern with a traditional style, someone that does this in their work is Alexander McQueen. His spring 2010 collection used snake skin in a mirrored design, what I like about this that you see the pattern and then you start to see what the pattern is made up from. 

This is the picture that I took to work from 

I want on photoshop to create my pattern, I removed the background and made duplicates of my plant in different sizes.

I changed the colours of the plants so that some of them looked stronger than others, this also made the piece look deeper and feel like there's layers to it. I like how the colours looked when there a bit faded.

I then flipped the image and put them together, this gave me a mirrored affect which I was looking for.

This is my final design for this one, I'm hoping to make more of these and have a small collection. I wanted it to be coming out from the middle, that way it feel like it's coming out towards you. I do think that it would have maybe look better with more in it .The William Morris pieces have so much more going on which makes them a more interesting pattern. 

This piece was made in the same way as the other ones, there all somewhat different in their lay-out.