Surface Design Study  

    I was interested in creating intersecting forms that could be used as a repeat pattern in my design. It was important to me that this design could be split into sections that would create new combinations of forms when rearranged. This design would be used as a print on a textile or wallpaper. 

    For this project, I took inspiration from the graphic, simple forms in wallpaper/ textile designs like the one on the left. I also looked at colour and form in surface design on commercial products, but ended up creating forms that were less abstracted in my design. 

    This project was the most challenging when I was trying to figure out how the construction geometry of this pattern was going to work. Some feedback from the critique that influenced this design was to simplify even further since the pattern itself is a lot to look at. After the critique, I went from hexagon tiles on a diagrid to square tiles on a horizontal grid.  

 Construction geometry and Osnaps were my best friend in the making of this pattern. Below is a process photo of me creating the forms. I sometimes changed the orientation of the quadrants as I worked so that the creatures would look proportionate if they were configured in a way that resembled a form that was familiar (like a cat). 

       Here is what the offset curves looked like, ready to be hatched. It was kind of a pain to get to this point; I didn't anticipate the curves deviating from the blue anchor points I created once I offset them. This meant that once hatched, the sections would no longer align like I drew them to. The fix was simple but tedious-- I offset my anchor points and snapped the ends of the offset curves to the new anchor points. There was a lot of zooming in to see where the offset curves truly ended. 

  

  After that, I had to close some of the sections that did not connect after I offset the original curves and get rid of some points that created self intersecting loops when hatched. For the actual hatching, I created a colour palette in Paletton. I wanted my colours to be reminiscent of muscle/ intestines/ hot dogs.  

    Below is the final of the four sections that I used for this design. To create the larger array with more combinations of sections, I created an 8x8 square and in each quadrant I copied a different arrangement of the base four sections. 

Here is a 2x2 array of the design at the top of this post. In the future, I think that I will play more with how the base of the array is arranged so that I can see more of the possible intersections. 

PS Here are the 10 examples of surface design I found