the design process

i've been working on some new design ideas in the past couple of weeks (i think i actually really inspired MYSELF with all those handprinted examples) and have tackled it from all different angles. i did a little sketching and a little carving, both very, very fun and a few designs emerged that will or may become future prints. but it's a funny thing this process of designing. i have this leaf design, created last year when i first started carving blocks for printing. i've always meant to turn it into a screen, i have scanned it in and traced into illustrator, i have spent HOURS arranging and rearranging leaves into a satisfactory pattern and it just will not happen. that magic moment when you go, "yep, that's it". even "yep, that's good enough" would suffice in this case.

on monday we spent a glorious day with a big group of friends at one of my pal's family property in st andrews. her grandma's house that once stood there was taken in the big bush fires a few years ago and she decided to build elsewhere but kept the property, which includes a vineyard and kilometers of bushland. the area has bounded back to life and i spent some time wandering around the bush camera in hand, taking an almost ridiculous amount of photos of mushrooms and fungi.








when we got home that night, after the kids had bathed and gone to bed, i sat on the couch and worked with the leaf pattern. again. i rotated and shuffled and duplicated and shrank and expanded and still could not get anywhere i was happy with. frustrated, i edited my mushroom photos from the day and uploaded them to flickr. then i opened up illustrator again and drew the most simplistic of mushrooms. and another. and another. until, about 15 minutes later i had a pattern that i was completely and utterly in love with.

sometimes it just happens that way.



here is a sneak peek of my new, as yet unnamed, print. i'll have this one, in overcast on bone, plus another colourway or two in my shop over the weekend. the leaves will wait for another day : )

ps. can i also say how totally floored i am by the fact that i can now go from thought to design to finished screen in a matter of days?? the screen for this was created with the speedball photo emulsion kit and sunlight, transparencies printed by officeworks (i spread the design over three A4 pages and trimmed and taped them together to create a larger transparency), more details on this process here.