Research
Starting off this process I collected 10 examples each of patterns in nature and patterns in made made structures.
Nature:
Man-Made:
As you can mostly tell from my chosen images, my theme for my nature piece I had deccided to go with either the structure of trees or fruit as a theme, and for my man made piece I was going in a mostly car-based theme.
My next step was to create some sketches and petal ideas from both of these categories.
I wasn’t specific to doing either nature or man-made in these sketches and I almost combined the two a bit. I wanted to test and see how organic I could make the shapes in the man-made materials. A lot of the patterns already present were pretty heavily organic anyway so I wanted to push that a little bit. I had the idea that I was leaning toward a tree based theme for my nature one at first, so most of the nature petals present here are based in that realm.
Production
Next I started testing out these ideas in their own mandalas.
This was the first piece I came up with and it turned out interesting, but the patterns just didn’t feel that satisfying. I had chosen to create value through line weight shifting instead of an actual value change because it felt much more natural and looked better in my opinion.
The patterns in this one just really didn’t feel complete. I was using radial symmetry in this piece rather than true mandala symmetry and the rhythm of it just did not feel quite right.
I shifted from working in sketchbook to working in photoshop so I could take advantage of the mandala symmetry and create my full petal designs from my previous step.
This was more of a test idea to get an idea of the direction I wanted to go with this new process. I had liked the symmetry but it felt very empty and lacked a lot of the depth and texture of the previous design. This was something I wanted to improve upon.
This was my second attempt at doing the nature piece in the new process, I had mainly based it off of the shape of maple leaves. I wasn’t a huge fan of it and it felt really overwhelming where as I kind of wanted to go with a simpler design for this one as it would be the one I transferred to analogue. I decided to shift my focus from leaves and trees to fruit.
This was my first and final draft working in this theme instead of trees. It felt a lot more substantial and the symbolism was more prominent than the last pieces. I liked this much more and preferred it so I went with this as the piece I would be transferring to Bristol.
The next thing I would be working on is my man-made pattern piece. I wanted to make this one look a bit more complicated since it would be my digital piece, as well as to make up for the lack of value as I was still using line weight in preference to this. I started out with a small piece in the middle that I would build off of, it consisted of one of my original petal designs from the first sketching process and a few other sketches based on my found images.
I was really liking how this one was turning out and wanted to stick with this and simply expand it outward a bit.
This ended up being my final piece for my man-made, I had simply continued upon the last piece and added more details of my images and made patterns out of them in the expansion process.
My next step was to vectorize my man-made piece and transfer the nature piece from digital to Bristol.
I started by vectorizing the man made. I just took it into illustrator and used auto trace, it did a pretty good job and I just had to clean up a few details for the final piece.
Finally I transferred my digital design to it’s final place. I printed the design out as wide as I could and covered the back of the sheet in graphite.
Next I placed this sheet on my 12″ x 12″ Bristol board and taped it down. Then I pressed down on all the linework with a ballpoint pen to outline everything.
I took the printed page off and then filled in all my linework with micron pens and erased all my pencil marks from earlier and my piece was finished.
Final project: Mandala Pattern