My first pattern was inspired by one of Gaiman's quote from one of the short story that called 'The Witch's Headstone' and this is the quote '.. travel on a house of chicken legs' .
Below are images of Neil Gaiman's official book cover.
Below are my reference images for the house. I found a very useful website called http://www.100abandonedhouses.com/ which contain a lot of variety different type of houses.
^Sketches of houses with chickens/witchs' legs.
^ These are some illustrations that I created using some tools in Photoshop. I think I am going to do 10 different houses (5 with chickens legs and 5 with witches legs). I did more than 10 sketches so that will benefit me.
This image above fail because the house look too bright and doesn't suit with my theme and concept. So I might change the colour similar to the previous house. e.g. black colour for the wall and dark yellow colour for the window.
I had to use Hue/Saturation to change the colours
I came out with this. I don't like the outcome as the texture is too big compared to the other houses that I creates. So I probably not going to use this house to put on my pattern, perhaps I could remake it.
After a while, I realised that the house doesn't have a creepy and dark feeling into it because I put them in a white background. After I had a long battle with myself, I decided to change the colour of the background from white to black (as most Gaiman's book cover background colour are black) and black colour will give more creepy and dark feeling into my design. Which mean I had to change the colour of the house by using Hue/Saturation.
I either use the lasso tool or the pen tool to create those shapes in Photoshop. I am trying to not use Illustrator as Illustrator is my comfort zone
Because I will be screen printing, it is my job to make sure all the same colour in the same layer
In order to get some part of my illustration look identical, I usually use a duplicate trick where I duplicate the object/layer then flip it if i needed to.
Because I am so demanding on make sure everything is neat and tidy, I usually use the grid as a guide for me to get everything align.
The image above are my 10 houses that I have create for the repeated pattern.
Below are some experiments on colours.
I know I will be screen print this pattern, I just want to see the possible outcome for the colour after I screen print it.
At first I picked yellow but suddenly I realised that it didn't give a creepy and dark effect so I experimented with other colours e.g. purple, blue and red. I think for colour I probably going to use monochrome and dark red.
I just realised that I haven''t separate the colours. So I had to restart my pattern again by making a new A3 document and placing each one of the house illustration in the pattern document.
But before placing them in the pattern document in Photoshop, I had to group and name them so they will not mix up with the other house documents.
^ I grouped each house and place them in the A3 pattern document.
Then I merged all the same colour shapes into one layer.
For screen printing then I changed each of its level until it turned black, save as Jpeg and ready to expose.
^ These are some of test of screen printing. To be honest none of them are successful. It could be because of :
- The colour meant to be dark red and monochrome but I mixed the colour wrongly.
- My screen is too small so all the positive cramp into one A3 screen
- My paint is too thick - not enough emulsion
- The illustrations are too small for the paint to get through the screen
After talking to a technician in the workshop, he told me that my paint is too thick. He also advised me to come back at 1pm to buy some emulsion so I can make my paint less thick and not easy to dry.
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