Last week I made a trip to London and saw the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the V&A. I was really fascinated with the complexity of his designs. He seems to have gotten inspirations from an infinite variety of different sources and he had no fear of taking patterns from other cultures and transforming them into something new. That inspired me ;o)

MOODBOARD

This project takes me back to the ancient Egypt. If we could travel in space and time, what kind of experiences would we have there? I´m sure, we´d see incredible things: people worshipping the sun and the moon, powerful gods and goddesses, mystic rituals, hidden treasures … I would like to capture some of the ancient spirit and bring it alive in my collection.

SHAPES AND PATTERNS

Here are some of the shapes and patterns I selected. (I could fill a dozen pages with them, but I decided to show just one ;o)

COLOUR PALETTE

I took 18 colours out of the 2 pictures below. Maybe I will have to change one or the other colour in the process, but for now I´ll leave it like this.

SKETCHES

Here are some of my sketches. By drawing the motifs I wanted to get a feeling for the shapes and the design language of the egyptian illustrations. I usually build the shapes of my patterns right on the computer, so the sketches are not very detailed and just a reminder of what I want to draw. (see first motif below). 

DIGITALIZATION

These are my digital sketches and the first ideas for repeats. Also designs for the first patterns (I started with a blender print and a secondary print) ... 

FINAL COLLECTION

THE PATTERNS

PRINTS

Today I had the first swatches printed out ... they look quite good, but I discovered some mistakes in the repeats ...

... below you can see the mistakes: I forgot to enlarge my background colour rectangle before I made the final repeat. The rectangle for the background colour should be larger the rectangle for the repeat, otherwise the pixels at the edge of the tif document are lighter than they should be ....

Thanks, Elizabeth for this great class :o)). You helped me to create my first "real" collection!

 

XMAS 2018

I still have some fabric pieces of this collection and decided to use them for xmas gifts. Here´s one ;o).