we started making our repeat prints. at first we were not sure what we were doing we literally got into the class and started drawing but thought they were just drawing exercises and we would start our actual design within the next week. so we had our drawing, in our groups there were three of us and we each had about 8 drawings.

this is one of my drawings that didn't get included. its an earring!

this is a sponge, we could only use one colour. this drawing is quite boring

we cut out some cirle-y dottys from this drawing of a tea pot for our pattern

heres all my groups beautiful drawings on the wall

we then had a large piece of paper and had to cut out our drawings and stick them on in a nice looking way down the middle, we couldn't go too close to the edges.

once we were happy with that we had to find a route down the middle of the design, called a 'cut through'. a cut through is made so that that isn't an obvious join in your repeat pattern, if you worked in a box and repeated the box it would be obvious where the join is, so you have to find a line through the middle where you can cut so when it gets printed next to each other it matches up. none of us were really happy with our drawings because they were all so rushed and because we didn't think these were going to be used in our actual design we didn't really put a lot of care and effort into them, they were also timed drawings between 5 minutes and one of them was only given a minute. it was different for everyone because everyone has there own way of working and doing things and to be honest i wouldn't have spent as long sorting out the placement as we did but the other two members of the group are a lot more thoughtful and are almost perfectionists, where as i guess i'm more slap dash and then go back to things to refine them more. it was difficult also because i feel that the two other members of the group have a similar sort of aesthetic which is really different to mine. once you have done the cut through you stick it back together but so that the edges that were on the outside were then on the inside down the middle. so then our design was busy round the outside and empty in the middle, we then filled in the empty areas with more drawings and patterns to fill the space. we weren't overly happy with our design but the exercise seemed to be more about how to do the process of making a repeat pattern. we also figured that at the moment our design was only in black and white and blue, because blue and black were the colours we were drawing in but when we do the actual printing it would be in different colours so it will look nicer. talking about colours i am nervous about choosing colours because i don't know my group very well and I'm not sure what their taste in colours is like, i like bright colours that clash: my favourite colour combination would be a yellowy green and pink, but i could be surprised i guess.

xxx