Mapping and Illustrator
After a successful day taking rubbings from the locale, and having scanned those results in, we are now looking a manipulating those images with a combinations of level adjustments in Photoshop and tracing over those in Illustrator, both manually and using live trace. Then played with creating patterns, using scale and repetition to distort, abstract and subvert our designs.
Having done a mixture of live trace and manual mark making over the rubbings, I'm finding that I do enjoy the precision of the live trace but the manual marks make for far more interesting patterns, the choice each time, of what is kept and what isn't kept, creates something organic and dynamic. You end up in places you weren't expecting.
I feel the way to success with these is repetition, trying something new or slightly different each time. You will never get the same pattern twice.
The first image shows patterns from a rubbing of a small tile mosaic wall, these have been live traced and then manipulated, these are ok, but i'm really not excited by them yet. I will try layering them up to see if that helps.
This second image, I really like the marks, they came from a playground floor tile, these were hand drawn over the top and I only picked out some of the marks, it feels much more playful. I had a play with scale and shearing, then adding text from my voice recording at the time, I wanted it to feel fun and silly, I'm not sure how skilful it is or particularly professional looking but it's a start.
The pattern below if from type of long thin drain cover, the pattern ended up looking like reptile skin, that inspired me to play with some colour, I think this is that start of something nice but I still need to identify a way to push it forward as it is still feeling underdeveloped and amateurish at the moment. I am struggling to work out what it is...
