SJMA - Textile Design Workshop!

I went to a Textile Design workshop yesterday at the San Jose Museum of Art, offered as part of the museum's current exhibition called 'Beauty. Tessellation and repetitive imagery was the theme of the workshop and is what is really the foundation of making a print design (textile or otherwise). After the design is finalized, the imagery can be printed via screen-printing or as a Photoshop-edited image sent to a printer for tiling and reproduction.

Our schedule for the three-hour workshop included:

Task 1: Look at graphic inspiration from the exhibit;
Task 2: Draw a base image leaving some white space around the outer edges. My image was a living room with an antique sofa, Art Deco lamp, and modern painting and rug;
Task 3: Cut the base image into quarters and re-arrange them (horizontally and vertically) in which you could add more drawn elements into the rearranged to minimize white space and to create secondary designs; and
Task 4: Using printed copies of the rearranged image, repeat them to see what a textile design would look like.

What I thought worked the best based on student work -- were spontaneous and organic forms rather than planned single images. Here are photos of my work including the original drawing, the rearranged image, and then a repeating pattern based on the rearranged image that could be printed as a textile design.

Original Drawing (Post Pen and Watercolor)

Quartered and Rearranged Drawing

Repetition of Quartered/Rearranged Drawing - What a Textile Print could look like

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