Autonomous… Describes things that function separately or independently.
Substrate…An underlying substance or layer that can be added onto.
To begin this project my task was to pick a word from one noun, one process, one descriptive and an outcome, the words are chose were..
- Lubaina Himid – A British artist who’s work revolves around black women, and uses many African inspired patterns and colour palettes in her work.
- Mark – Mark making is a term used to describe the different lines, patterns, and textures we create in a piece of art.
- Smooth – Having an even and regular surface; free from perceptible projections, lumps, or indentations.
- Wallpaper – The outcome of my project I will be designing for.
The proposal for my project is to design pattern repeats using elements of mark making, taking inspiration from historic African colour and designs palette. To fit the brief of looking at futuristic tech, I will be researching into futuristic wallpaper trends, and then merging the two designs together, historic and futuristic to create a collection of my own repeated wallpaper designs.
The first concept board I created revolves around the three words shown above, the colours are very bright and bold, and the patterns are in general pretty simple and are repeats of each other.
When creating my design board, I researched online historic African patterns, and found a few styles that caught my eye. This board really helped me pick out a few relevant shapes and styles that could then be transferred into my own designs. By taking some photos of blank wall space in my house it helped me to create a few mini sample illustrations, getting an idea of diameters and style.
My concept board for futuristic technology is exploring ‘wearable tech’, I have been looking at the ways in which the clothing stands out by using lights, without lights these clothes wouldn’t be interesting at all.
When it came to creating my samples I designed a number of samples developed from my ideas of historic African designs, and some other sample designs taking inspiration from futuristic lighting tech. From these samples i created my final designs by merging the two together styles together.
I am really happy with how these wallpaper designs came out, I used photoshop to create design repeats which made them suitable for wallpaper use. In terms of the purpose of my wallpaper, I created it with the idea of having ‘LED’ light strips installed behind my wallpaper, so that on every circle and square seen in my wallpaper, the lights would shine through.
This project stood out to being one of the most enjoyable for me, designing wallpapers is something I have always been passionate about and an element of design I would love to pursue in the future.
