inspiration

catching up with pattern

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

It’s been a while since posting here, but I’ve been busy enjoying summer adventures and developing exciting pattern research alongside getting the academic year underway. I’ve also moved in to a new studio space so I’ll share that in due course.

My pattern research focusing on the repeat print block and how it can be used to generate multiple variations to evolve pattern options continues, with sampling with screen and lino printing. I thought I’d share the more structural outcomes here, linking back to my book art practice. I enjoy discovering links that connect the broader practice I’ve developed over the last twenty five years.

As I folded the sheets of printed pattern the forms appeared to suggest a built environment so I explored the idea a little in how I photographed the pieces. Testing scale and contexts is a vital part in developing a pattern, and I enjoy the possibilities.

summer colour palettes

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Colour inspires me. I love to work with colours; creating pairings and partnerships of colour to build reactions between them, evoking moods and setting a spirit through colour choices. I notice colour relationships every day, and enjoy considering why certain colours thrive alongside others. I love to wear colours too, and like to contrast materials as well as colour to create interesting relationships. I do worry if I find myself in brown trousers and a green top – I don’t want to look like a tree!

Over the last eighteen months I’ve spent time mixing colour using gouache paints, matching colours perfectly with items collected from walks. Little collections of seaweed, shells, catkins, feathers and leaves have sat patiently in the studio while I mix and match. I’m good at matching colours and would be perfectly happy spending hours a week doing just that.

I also enjoy creating colour palettes, sometimes for projects, or my teaching sessions, and sometimes just because what I see around me suggests a perfect palette to explore and create. Our garden has been a bit of a project over the last two years and this summer the new borders are filled with colour that bring such joy to me. My mood is lifted when I see colours working together well. Here are two results from a photograph taken in the garden earlier this month, just because the splashes of colour were pleasing enough to capture.

I like the dominant green that provides the backdrop for the brighter colour accents, and the shapes of the flowers are like splashes of colour dropped in to the soothing green. The pink, red and orange provide the warmth, while the blues are calming and restful. The depths of the border at the bottom of the flower stems are dark, no doubt cool away from the summer sun.

I decided to explore the role proportions of colour play in a palette in the second image. The width of each colour stripe is representative of the area it covers in the image. Back in 1994 this was one of the summer projects I was tasked with as I started my degree in textile design – and all these years on I still enjoy doing it! You can see how the colours perform when dominant, or work as accent colours in thin slithers. There are always main characters and supporting roles in a palette, but it takes all sorts to put on a performance!

When selecting the colours in the image for the palette I worked with the larger areas of colour first, then looked to see how the colours had natural partners to sit next to in the stripe. The accent colours grab the attention of my eyes. Both images reflect the same colour palette, but present themselves quite differently.

colour mixing nature

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Back in March I began a new series of colour of works on paper that were simply about mixing and matching colour, evolving hues through the process of painting individual swatches to build the narrative in a sequence, as if a technical exercise at art school. You can read about those pieces here.

KFarley_grass_gouacheI’ve continued to gather pieces from nature on the walks I’ve been on this summer and have continued with the process of mixing colour and so I thought I’d share some here.

KFarley_wheat_gouache

I’m doing this simply as I love to make colour, and really enjoy working with the gouache paint for its colour qualities. The process occupies my mind, suggests potential avenues for future work and connects me with nature through the mementoes I make. The seasons change and the colours alter, but the swatches hold memories in the process of mixing, and I can almost smell the dry heat of the corn, and the cool shade of the wood where I found the Jay feather.

qrf

 

passion for passi flora pattern

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Many years ago my flatmate was given a passion flower plant and when the flowers came we were both in awe of their splendid form; a thing of beauty in our otherwise less than beautiful flat in Camberwell, south London. I made drawings of the flowers and sometime later developed some patterns from it, screen printing it as repeating designs and placement prints. I created the motifs by deconstructing the elements that constitute the flower head.

More years passed and sometime around 2012 I revisited those screen printed patterns, this time interpreting them as lino cuts as part of my Plot to Plate series of editioned lino prints. Last year I planted two passion flower plants in our new garden and last week we had the first bloom. It took me right back to that first flower in the flat in Camberwell, and was reminded of the pattern again.

passiflora_web

Whenever I look back at old work I’m likely to want to make changes, and this is the case here too, but each design also holds a moment, defines a time, and sometimes that makes it what it is. I’d not imagined I’d connect that flower to my practice almost twenty years later…

This pattern remains available as a set of patterned Plot to Plate greetings cards.

KateFarley_GC5002_blog

drawing evolution – perspective and mapping

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Several weeks ago I started, with no other intention other than to pass the time, making drawings of the trees across the fields I could see as we waited our turn at the farm shop. This was simply about making time for me to clear my head of all the other stuff and pressures of this new routine we find ourselves in. Drawing is such a key part of what makes me tick, whether it’s for rest or work.

Week 2 came so I took my sketchbook and made new drawings that naturally evolved from the first week’s observations. In the second week I also took scissors to capture the shapes as paper cutouts in contrast to the lines I had focussed on in pencil. Each week I’ve made these drawings and over time I’ve noticed the growth of leaves, making it harder to focus on the tree structures, but I’ve also moved the drawing on as a familiarity of my subject is developing. I wrote a blog post on those first weeks here.

I’ve spent the last quarter century drawing landscapes with trees and remember a significant moment as a student of design, when I discovered the water colours by Crome and Cotman in the gallery in Leeds – particularly strange given they were from the Norwich School and I’d left Norwich to study in Yorkshire, but maybe that was the initial pull. I studied the way they divided the landscape with brushed areas of paint and they helped me to see that I too could explore ways to stylise the way I saw the landscape.

The drawings included in this post are all from week 5. I’ve added hints of fields containing the trees and those lines of containment are the edges holding the paths of trees. I’ve used the horizons from both a vertical and horizontal viewpoint and continued to stylise the tree forms throughout the five weeks. It’s getting harder as the trees flesh out their forms and we lost the details of the branches. I’m also suggesting depth of field with the scale of the trees near and far although I’m pulling the composition down to stretch out and extend the foreshortened landscape.

KFarley_Wk5_1_4

Throughout my career I’ve toyed with ways to map the perspective of landscape and use diagrammatic language, perspective and distorted elevations to represent viewpoints of 3D in 2D. The intention of the arcs was to suggest the sweeping viewpoint but in fact I think it hints at hillsides, and that really isn’t the case here in Norfolk. An undulating landscape maybe, but certainly not rolling hills – still, we can’t get it all right!

KFarley_wk5pics_4-8

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this drawing exercise so far and look forward to week 6 and what the drawings will discover next time. I’m also, rather naturally I suppose thinking about pattern evolution and how these may become design work. I have lots of ideas to mull over and be excited by … but there’s no rush.

Having posted some of the drawings on instagram over the weeks I’ve received lovely comments and messages from people enjoying the drawings and I’m so grateful for the votes of confidence in what I am doing, I really appreciate that. Many thanks, I hope you continue to enjoy the drawing! ….

Save

Brassica purple, harvest time

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Having sown the seeds for purple sprouting last summer it has been the usual long wait until harvest time, but we have been picking it for the last few weeks. It always feels good to pick the brassica because the new season of crops are a while off harvesting.

KFarley_Brassica1a

The purple of the sprouting inspired my colour palette for the Plot to Plate tea towels.

plottoplate_brassica_KF

I can’t resist colour matching, so here we are again …

KFarley_brassica1

drawing to see, drawing to notice.

/ katefarley / 1 Comment

Drawing has always been a great leveller for me and now is no exception. I make drawings to capture something I like the look of even if I haven’t got a clue how it might be useful at that time. Picked grasses, a homegrown tulip or a fragment of fabric all provide challenges that relax me but also creatively inspire my lifetime of looking to draw – it’s not a coincidence there’s a play on words with drawing in my blog name.

Having some time spare while sat in the car at the local farm shop car park three weeks ago I took a good look around me at the view and with the luxury of time I took out my sketchbook and drew a line. This was a landscape already familiar, but in drawing a subject it is with a closer examination that one can see more.

Firstly I noticed the skyline meeting with the trees in the distance but as I drew that line it was being interrupted by the nearer trees cutting over the fluidity of the horizon. The trees contained strong shapes but not as the summer masses they will hold in full leaf in due course. The branches were clearly defined, but the added haze of smaller branches suggested the fuller form.

I made reasonably quick sketches of the same view several times, each time starting with a different area as a focus. Sometimes it was the gap between two trees, or a distant field and as I became more familiar with the shapes in front of me I engaged with details of branches to define the structures of the trees. I focused on three clusters of trees that provided different visual qualities but were united by the view.

KFarley_wk1_ALDIS_blog

The process of drawing and re-drawing the same thing is something I love to do – just as Monet would have painted the same cathedral or hay stacks. Where Monet was fascinated with the changing light and what that did to the colour and shadows, for me it is a process of understanding and familiarising in order to stylise and to interpret, usually in line and shape. As I get to know my subject I can edit in and out the information to simplify what I am seeing in working out how to record it.

This blog post shows the same landscape being drawn on three different trips to the farm and I think you can see the familiarity allows for more freedom of the information I saw and captured. In week 2 I also took to scissors to cut out the shapes in pieces of white paper, asking myself to identify the positive and negative shapes within the landscape – see the image below. I cut out the same trio of trees several times and they work well layered, as the interpretations of the same subject matter is similar but evolves too.

KFarley_wk2_ALDIS_blog

This notion of repetition in order to get to know something is a really key part of my practice as a pattern designer and I’ve evolved this relationship in my drawing over the years. As far back as art school I drew and printed in series of works on paper, with the evolution of seeing in order to pare back being the really important part of my process. I teach drawing as a ‘getting to know you’ strategy too. I suggest a student does not spend the first hour asking the really personal questions of the subject sat in front of them, but to make small talk, get to know the subject superficially first of all, then you can be more up close and personal over time. I think I’ve written about this somewhere on the blog before.

I’m really pleased that within a very short time of drawing I have looked, learned and recorded the view, and once again taken away my way of seeing that landscape overlooked by so many of us in our day to day routines. I’ve returned to this task and now have about twenty drawings from three consecutive visits. The trees are hinting at holding more green but the summer fullness is a while away for now. The buzzard circles and the tractor gets to work, I shall be back again, see below for the drawings in week 3.

KFarley_wk3_ALDIS_blog

evolving colour in the making

/ katefarley / 1 Comment

A walk in the Spring sunshine gave impetus to a very simple and mindful exercise back in the studio; to make the colour of the landscape. A sprig of willow contains so many different colours. Those colour qualities will alter as the clouds skud across the sky casting shadows, and as the sun ripens the buds.

KFarley_yellow_willow_1500_KF

With paints at the ready I knew it wasn’t about making the one colour, but the narrative of generating colour as my process of journeying from one to the next. I wanted to paint each of the swatches of colour I mixed as I evolved the paint story, observing and recording the subtleties of the change in hues. Selecting a limited number of tubes of gouache to begin made it more interesting. To start I selected the dominant colour I was aiming for, and had a little piece of nature with me as reference. I developed the swatches of colour, selecting one, and then another hue to achieve, step by step, slowly and patiently filling the page.

KFarley_ycolourpalette_1500_KF

Gouache is a beautiful paint and this exercise reminded me of a wonderful morning teaching colour mixing to BA1 Textile Design students earlier this year. Getting the right amount of water, ensuring the colours are cleanly mixed, and then making that one painted line flat and even – it all takes practice.

KFarley_ytubes_colour_1500_KFI was lucky enough to have excellent colour teaching during my time at art school and consider myself strong at seeing and achieving the right colour mix. At uni I remembering saying to the print technician “it’s nearly right, I’m happy with it”, and she’d say, “Kate, it’s not what you set out to make, keep going until you get there!” I thank her for teaching me that persistence and these days my students know I’m particular (a preferred word to fussy!) when it comes to colour. Getting the colour right is so important and you may as well enjoy the journey to get it right. Textile products sit alongside fashion and interior items made from other materials, and the colours need to match / coordinate, so quitting before you get the right colour may be a sales / employment disaster too!

Interestingly, some of my current students were discussing my approach to colour recently and one shared that I’m not keen on black outlines around shapes in print designs. Another one commented that they hadn’t heard that, but would keep it in mind. I jumped in to defend the comment I’d originally made – a black outline is too obvious, unquestioning, the default, rather like Times New Roman black typeface when you open Microsoft Word. Too easy. I ask students and designers to think about whether the black line is the best for the design. If you think of all the other colours you can use, I think you may find another and better alternative!

At the end of this colour mixing time I am left with souvenirs of the process, memories of the walk and beautiful colour. This is real colour away from the back lit screen I too often see colour from. I shall do this again.

KFarley_y3xcolourswatches_1500_KF

international pattern collaboration

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

It all began in an email with the subject line, ‘Hello from Tokyo’ I received in November 2017, letting me know how much my tea towels for David Mellor were admired in a Japanese design company. The email went on to ask if we could discuss a potential collaboration for a capsule fashion collection featuring a print designed by me. Firstly I was excited to think my patterns had made their way to Japan, but secondly, that sounded a great idea, tell me more! A few email exchanges later, and we agreed to meet the next time the company director of Stamps Inc. was in London so I could show him my portfolio to discuss the idea for the new pattern they would like to commission for their fashion collection.

The meeting with Shu and his colleague Yoko in a central London hotel was exciting; I showed my work and it was met with positive discussion. I was also reintroduced to the tea towels that had made it to Japan all the way from my studio, via a David Mellor Design shop! We sat at a large table and I showed them my portfolio, spreading the many sheets out covering the whole surface. Having shown all the other work and following some discussion in Japanese between colleagues, the director chose the very first page he had seen – the cover page! The choice was not what I was expecting but we shared and developed ideas for me to sample: colours, time-lines and garments. We then took some photographs to record the start of the project together, for when we would be able to share our story – and even asked the hotel doorman to take a pictures of the three of us with a London bus behind us.

The selected design was a graphite pattern of pencil scribbles of varying tones and rhythms, later to become the title of the collection: Scribble. There are lots of variables such as scale, rhythm, tone and  overall order in the pattern we had to make decisions before I set about creating the final artwork. I emailed across some small sketches to explain the repeat process for production to check we were understanding each other as we had to ensure we understood the terminology that each of us used in our different languages.

KateFarley_SCRIBBLEwip_1_1500

I shared several images of new drawings to provide the variations / considerations over email before committing to the final design. The final fabrics were to be screen printed so I planned to draw out the whole design in full repeat by hand (approximately 60 x 90cm), scan it in and transfer it to Japan for screen print production. I started the large final drawing twice as I wasn’t happy with the first one. Initially the marks I drew appeared tense, but I also had to work out how to create the different qualities with the pencils across a vast piece of paper, and how not to smudge the areas I had drawn. I drew the design at 80% scale to make scanning it in possible, meaning I had to take in to account the slight increase in the size of the marks in the final result. I also had to ensure the top of the design matched the bottom, as the edges were to act as a cut-through for the screen printing process of repeating the pattern, fitting like a jigsaw, top to bottom. The design was edge to edge, left to right, fitting the width of the fabric so there was no horizontal pattern-repeat.

KFARLEY_SCRIBBLEwip_1500crop

The final artwork took almost ten hours to draw, and I did that mainly over two long evenings. I had it scanned in at a very high resolution, adapted the size of artwork to 100% and sent the digital file to Japan – with my fingers crossed that the printer could work their magic, including colour separating the graphite tones for the two screens each colourway would require!

There was a wholesale launch in Tokyo so I sent some of my original drawing samples over to feature as framed artwork in the exhibition and I was sent photographs of the lengths of fabric on show. Very exciting! Orders were placed and there was a good response. A further email request came from Japan, to meet again in London to see the fabric. Another exciting moment – also scary – what if I didn’t like the results!? In the stylish interior of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel lounge there was no need to worry. Great care had been taken to translate my drawing to screen printed cotton lawn fabric, in two colours – referencing the two colours of my David Mellor patterns Chelsea, in grey, and Pride in blue. The fabric felt beautiful and the printing fabulous. It was a special meeting.

I was able to see the marketing material including my name alongside Japanese text I couldn’t decipher, describing our meeting and the collaboration. I have had to be patient while the wholesale launch orders were being produced before we can promote the project I’ve had to keep under wraps for well over a year … until now!

It has been an absolute pleasure working with Shu and Yoko, learning about the company and their pride in who they work with including the products they develop. It has been a highly successful collaboration from my perspective in that we have discussed all the aspects of the process and trusted each other to do the best for it, each learning about the other and having good communication throughout. We have shared news of the differing seasons and national events over the course of the project, and they’ve watched via instagram as I’ve moved homes and jobs. I’ve loved having this connection with people in another corner of our world, created as a result of some tea towels I designed over five years ago!

mellor_scribble_1500_banner

Save

pattern potential

/ katefarley / Leave a comment

Tomorrow I shall be presenting a keynote paper at a symposium about Motifs at Nottingham Trent University. I’m looking forward to lots of discussions and sharing my own practice-based research including projects with David Mellor Design and Barbican.

Screenshot 2020-01-28 at 11.08.00