New Directions - Part 2 - More of the Design Process.

 I love the design process and can no longer start a project without doing some sort of design, so I was thrilled when I heard that the UK Complex Weavers Group had arranged a design workshop with Laura Thomas.

In the last post I introduced the first steps Laura lead us through and here, in this post, I’ll show you my next steps.

Looking at the images on my mood board the next thing to do was to explore colour, so using my favourite medium of watercolour I looked at stripes in the colours found in the images.  The first stripes are rarely the best so it’s well worth the time taken to paint as many as you can, in your favourite medium until you feel the colours are right, not necessarily exact.

The next obvious think to look at is texture and it was while practicing marks using different tools and studying my images that I realised that the embroidery on the coat was herringbone.  

Using colour and texture and the herringbone idea I then tried out different ways to represent the idea.  

So many people ask me why it worth doing these exercises, but it’s doing them that helps to distill the ideas and I realised that herringbone was definitely the main structure I want to explore for this project and use two different shades of dark blue, one in the warp and one in the weft.

In the next post I’ll be explaining where the design process took me, but in the mean time, sign up for Laura’s newsletter as she will be running this course in the future.