Wallcoverings Project Feb/March 2010

Brief - To produce a collection of designs for wallcoverings looking at Greek and Roman sculpture and antiquity.

Inspired by Timorous Beasties black flock on a black background and also their detailed line drawings.

I did quite a few drawings from a copy of World of Interiors and an article on a recreation in a Berlin museum of Duke Moritz William of Saxe-Merseburg’s ‘Spiegelkabinett,’ which translated means ‘hall of mirrors’ or ‘house of mirrors.’ used to display artifacts.

Also looking through a book on Greek mythology I came across a skull of an athelete that still had his gold crown of leaves around his head. I liked the idea of using this image as a centre piece for my designs.








 

Using Gesso was an interesting idea and I tried it with some photocopies of my drawings. I did add some pale colour in and also some gold on the leaves but it did get a little lost within the layers of Gesso. Also adding a lot of layers means it takes longer to rub areas off to reveal the image underneath. There is also the risk that the wet and dry sandpaper will rub through the photocopy.

Because all my images were drawn individualy, it was quite difficult to know how to place all these drawings together in order to make a composition. The easiest way was to photocopy my designs and try fitting them together.

I knew I wanted to use the skull, so a lot of my designs seemed to work around this.


I also though about the use of the leaves and I drew up some leaves that I scanned into Illustrator and strung them together to make long garlands. These came out really nicely using the laser cutter, which isn't always the most simplest of things to use. But practice makes perfect.




I love how the black leaves look. I've thought of using them to make layers on my backgrounds.

Black paper with grey and gold acrylic and laser cut leaves with black print over the top. This was one of my text backgrounds to get an idea of how my print might look.


























This is using the same background but without the leaves. The print has been printed with gold foil. Scrunching the foil paper up before heat pressing it on also meant the creases stuck to areas of the background where there had been acrylic paint, leaving interesting lines and patterns.




















One of my favourite prints is this one. Using the black paper and grey acrylic paint background I have flocked the design onto it with flock paper. I love the effect of the black flock on the dark background. I think the flock shows up the detail of the lines of the drawings really well.




















I am now looking at extending my ideas and taking the images to a larger A1 scale. I'm considering using hints of black and gold foil as highlights to the decoration and also more flock as I love the effect of this.