Having used the first week of the project to explore pattern generally and gain an understanding of what elements make a pattern, I began to look further at the specific theme of the coral reef. I wanted to experiment with a few different techniques after using only drawing and painting in my initial illustrations.
REPEAT PATTERN USING ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
This was my first attempt at drawing digitally without first basing it off a physical drawing. I created it directly on Illustrator, using my previous patterns and images of coral reefs as references. This isn’t a finished piece of work by any means, it was purely just for me to see how I could use Illustrator within my project to translate work into a digital medium. More than anything, I learnt how to use the program to create repetitive patterns from a few images. Personally, my visual language does not include solely digital work. I may consider trying this method again but using hand drawn images.
PHOTOHOP EXPERIMENT
As I’m placing my work in the context of the pollution of the coral reefs, one thing that is really important for me to communicate is the bleaching that occurs due to this pollution. Here I developed some of my initial patterns and illustrations into one image on photoshop. Playing around with the light and saturation to dull the images gives the impression of bleached coral, and placing the original next to it highlights this tragedy which is currently affecting our oceans. This idea of slowly fading colour could be incorporated into my final outcome in some sense.
LINO PRINTING
Using Lino to make a stamp was an efficient way of achieving a repeat pattern effect as once I had cut out one design I could just use it as many times as necessary. However, it was time consuming and I don’t feel the result communicates my ideas adequately. I want to show the bright colours of the coral reefs and it was difficult to produce an opaque layer of colour with the materials I was using. Lino is also not an easy medium to make patterns in as my tools don’t allow for precise details.
NEXT STEPS
Experimenting with different techniques has allowed me to make informed decisions about the materials I might use in my developed work. I’m not interested in working solely digitally as I have found the initial hand drawn patterns I made to be my favoured pieces thus far. Although editing hand made work on Illustrator/photoshop could be an option. Lino printing also didn’t work out for me but it did help me to generate ideas about how I’m going to incorporate motifs of coral reefs into my designs.
I’m still unsure about how I’m going to go about portraying the idea of the reefs into the final outcomes. One way of doing it would be a literal, figurative depiction, like a drawing of the reef with patterns included within their shapes. On the other end of the spectrum I could use the patterns found in the coral reef and its wildlife to create a more abstract representation. In order to come to this decision I’m going to continue developing both and then decide which is visually more successful.
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