Week 4

Throughout this week the focus was print, which was to be inspired by our family history. I wanted to look back at my family history focusing more on my grandparents and how my family developed from there. After looking into my history more I found that we have a family crest. I really liked the look of it as it has many interesting shapes such as the floral aspects and the helmet with feathers.

I then focussed on these aspects wanting to incorporate them into my print designs. First using the skills I had developed at the beginning of the week I used the magnetic lasso tool on Photoshop to cut out the helmet part of my crest. After doing this I improved the image by changing some of the effects such as the colour of the image to a darker colour so it was clearer. I then incorporated the helmet into a half drop repeat pattern which was more complicated to create however looks better than having my shape appear in straight lines, by having it as a half drop repeat pattern it will having the shape running diagonally instead. I wanted to create the half drop pattern because I felt that once I had placed the print onto a model it was more interesting to look at and looked better.

I then created several more patterns some featuring the feather aspect as a repeat half drop pattern, which I then layered across other patterns and changed the opacity and colour burns and saturations to create several different patterns that featured the same layers. I also incorporated some of the filter tools into my designs learning that they could change the patterns, by blurring, twisting and pixelating them, I found the twirl tool to be my preferred one which I used on different prints as although they still included the inspiration of my family history it was not obvious and generally made some unusual and exciting prints.

After playing around with the layers and settings I started looking into a different way of creating a pattern, so instead of repeating the same shape I created a cluster of the same shape, this repeated the same shape which in this case was a feather, I then layered multiple feathers of different sizes and at different angels on top of each other which flowed into a gradient of fewer smaller feathers. I liked this pattern the most because it was the most unusual and pleasing to the eye due to the overall shape the layers created and the raw visible lines, which I feel created quite an organic print as it was not too computerised and looked more natural as the lines and shapes were not perfectly accurate.

I think that if I were to do this week again I would manage my time better, as although I was able to create 20 different prints I felt that my presentation was weak due to the quality of my prints, because I had ran out of time to print on higher quality paper. Also I would have lightened my images as they appeared very dark when printed which meant that the effect of the print was lost as it was difficult to make out the print because of the use of dark colours.