OUIL603 - Monolith

Having such an open brief made the design process great fun. I began constructing the requested 'shapey creature' from my bank of printed shapes and textures. I discussed this process with Ben. Ben explained that as I progress the amount of physical printing and Lino cutting I do will become less as I will find it far more time effective and adaptable to collage. Having printed a lot of different shapes and textures over the last couple of years I now have a bank of sorts to sample from, I see it as sort of 'print lego', assembling different compositions and experimenting with distressed printed textures in a very productive process. I like this new pace as I do not get bored with images that I've spent hours carving.

My initial designs consisted of this lizard or dragon and offset circles that I find quite useful to build a composition, drawing the eye and using different sizes to include some Gestalt continuation. I varied the texture between the two different designs as I hoped to convince Monolith on a point I had thought to make when it came to screen printing. Having seen my previous work with textiles Monolith did ask if I would print the shirts, however being busy with uni and other live projects I had to turn it down. Recommending that they seek the help of a screen printing company in Leeds. I do however still need to consider the screen print process as the designer. The printed textures and rough edges in my work are successful digitally and sometimes in print, however I feel that T designs need to be bolder and a bit cleaner cut, i.e. I felt that less extreme textures in comparison to the reference images should be used on this project.     

The roughs and these mockups of my favoured design were sent as a proposal to Monolith. I also included a mirrored variant to get a bit of symmetry going, something I know their keen on. I explained in the email that I felt the design would be more successful with less texture within the shapes but we could still keep rough printed edges to keep my analogue aesthetic. 

At this point Monolith were yet to specify the colour and cut of the T shirts they planned to print onto, so I questioned these for further development.