Journal Day 154- Looking Back

Today I started organising and creating the worksheets for the project. I had not put any of them together after the flamingo designs had been done, as I was on a tight deadline, and so have been printing out the designs and placing them onto worksheets. As well as doing that, I placed my original mood boards onto A1 worksheets to present them, and to make notes around them on what it was that I liked about them/was inspired by. I have had them stuck up in my workspace for the whole project so I can see them easily, and now thought they would need presenting a bit better. In doing these two tasks, I had a chance to look back at my original ideas for the project, and it has really shown me how much I strayed from that inspiration for my own designs. I really should have referred back to them more often to maintain my original ideas, but got too bogged down in the computer room. However it does now give me the opportunity to go back, for my own personal satisfaction, and re-design the bird designs with the original mood boards ideas in mind. This will give me such a different series I believe, and also having done this project, will give me the confidence to really push the designs further than I seem to have done in this project.

I do believe that given more time for this project, I could have had an evaluative period (which I had planned on) to re-asses the designs and then improve on them. It was the inclusion of two new bird designs that eliminated this plan from my project. I really wanted to spend more time exploring what it was that made a pattern work, and with an evaluative period I believe I would have seen new ways of changing and pushing my designs to create much stronger patterns. It was really only at the end of the project, when I was getting bored of the designs, that I started to do this.  I would love to spend some time re-doing this project in many ways- starting, essentially, back at the beginning with drawings. I would then re-create my designs with these new elements much more based on the mood boards I originally created using the ideas I had taken from the other artists work.

These ideas included much more rotation of the animals, and random over-laying and over lapping of them with some being opaque. I would have tried to include more hand drawn pattern, such as stripes or doodles into the designs and shapes, and then over-layed (or under-layed) with a silhouetted version of the shape. However most of the designs became very simple, with the silhouette shape as the main motif. I regret this hugely and would really love to have more time to spend on this series of designs.

I have no doubt that when I do have the time, that I will re-vist both the bird series and the pear series, and will dedicate quite some time and energy into re-creating these designs. As I have said in my catalogue, at least the designs created in this course have shown me what I need to be doing more of, and what I did wrong with these designs. They have shown me how I should be designing and working, and how I can work and design. They have given me confidence and a great foundation from which to work with so much of the work and learning already done. Combining this with the online surface pattern course (with Rachel Taylor) that I'm doing, is giving me so much more confidence and excitement over the potential of what I can do. I feel that so much is possible, I just need to do it!

Abiento x