Project 2 week 8 and iDott week 2

This week I have mainly been planning my wallpaper designs for my self-initiated project. This has involved working on repeat designs and having these made into screens. On Monday, I screen-printed my initial samples, and these worked reasonably well, although I had trouble aligning the screen so that the repeats matched up exactly. This was partly because I was unaware about using registration points on the screen to make sure the design repeats exactly. The following day we had a taught session on how to screen print in repeat, so this will be really useful for future printing.

Repeat printing workshop.

I also worked on embellishing my small, postcard-style wallpaper samples, with embroidery and laser cut Perspex, which I dyed, to see how these might work on a large scale. I flocked onto these as well to add more texture and these worked well, although I realised I need to keep the samples under the heat press for around 3 minutes (longer than I initially though) to make sure the flock takes.

Dyeing perspex.

Embellished postcard samples.

When stitching onto the postcard samples, I realised that some types of paper like watercolour paper are too tough to stitch into on a large scale. Therefore, when scaling the designs up I will use thinner paper, but will still try to use paper with an interesting texture. The postcard samples took quite a long time to complete, however I think they will be really helpful for planning my bespoke wallpaper designs on a larger scale, as I will have an indication of which embellishments work best with which design.

To go with the screen-printed samples, I will also have some hand painted designs, which I traced and drew in repeat at a scale of 52 x 52 cm. the size of the repeats range between 23 x 13 cm and 26 x 26 cm to give variation in scale. These took a really long time to draw out, but I think they will have a very unique feel, which is part of the reason I wanted to do bespoke wallpaper in the first place.

Along with this, I have continued working on large-scale drawings for the i-dott Geo-Drawing brief. Instead of using found cardboard, which gave quite a scruffy effect, I bought some corrugated paper and painted this in the colours of my colour palette. I then cut into this neatly to create collages, which have an element of quirkiness, but retain a strong linear quality, which was missing from my earlier drawings/collages.

Large scale drawings for iDott.

Next week I plan to start painting and embellishing my large wallpaper samples, dye some more Perspex pieces and potentially get more cut, as well as doing more drawing in colour for Geo-Drawing, and translate these into croquis designs, to then scan in and repeat.