Small Project - Allotment. Image Making

-Following on from the visit to the school allotment space, the lead teacher sent images the children in the school had created for me to develop designs from.

-There are 14 classes who have participated in the project so I must have around 300 images!! A few to choose from!!

-The images are all so beautiful so it has been hard to decide, but I have looked at lines that will translate well as screen printed images. Ive added a few of the designs below. I first scanned the images and used the live trace method on illustrator to try and select details to develop, This didn't work very well as the images are all coloured in (I had asked for one colour as would be easier to scan but the children are young and Im pleased they've used all their creativity!)

-I tried a few different ways of scanning and editing the original images but nothing was working to develop the crisp line designs I wanted.

-I then traced the images and scanned the line art in, live traced these to sharpen them slightly without loosing any of the originality.

As there were many different subjects which I felt would look overly complicated together, I then took the childrens images and categorised them into different files which really helped to order both scale and imagery.

Eg. sheds...

From those file groups I then started to look at how each of those image subjects would best work. I felt like the sheds would look good in a row and that the plants and drawings of different pupils would suit a repeat pattern.

The plant image started in this way, but the vine like image was quite overpowering and made a linear repeat on the page so I gave it a half drop to the side to try and mix that up and make it less obvious..

This was the final repeat design to be printed in 2 colours, a nice clean and simple repeat..

I hope for this to be used as a pattern repeat for spaces in the allotment in which the design will not be able to be seen close up. It will be a clean fresh repeat and be something that be repeated in different spaces to make the space look cohesive.