Motif Madness!

This week I have been concentrating on making motifs so that I can transfer my favourite ones onto screens for printing. I have found this challenging for many reasons, one of which is working in black and white. I love colour so having to do them in black to be put on a screen before colour is added is a challenge in itself. I am also struggling to draw out good images from my visual research so far: my usual style is fine lines and shading and these images have to be the opposite. They have to have defined black edges so that they're crisp when being printed, and I can tell that it is going to take a while to get used to!

This is the work that I have done so far, and before going any further I want to reflect on what I have done to see where development is needed.

The piece in the top left of the picture consists of a black cut-out of some motorways around manchester, including the M60 orbital. These roads are part of my journey frequently so I tried to incorporate them into a motif. After doing this I was doubting what it looked like so I scanned it into the computer and quickly tried to rearrange the image to create a pattern, shown below, to show how I might use it in the print room.

The motifs in the middle of the top row consist of my physical mapped journey on the bus every day into university (the line in the middle includes the walking too). The line on the left is the route shown by the bus map (which wasn't proportional), the line in the middle is the exact mapped journey, and the line on the right was my interpretation of my journey whilst having my eyes closed. 

The third set of motifs shown below were inspired by my sketchbook pages, also shown below. I did these by sitting on the bus and putting my pen to paper loosely and letting the buses movements do the drawing. I also used the same technique whilst walking home to get some harsher lines. I then transferred this to motifs using ink and twigs that I found on my journey home to get different thicknesses of lines. If I had a set of a few of these lines on a screen, they might provide a nice background for other motifs once repeated, or even a pattern in themselves.

Leaves are only something I've recently started looking at. I seemed to some how ignore them whilst travelling to and from uni, looking around for anything to draw, missing the colourful autumn leaves that were under my nose. The motifs were drawn out from ideas in my sketchbook.

So far this idea has given me the most inspiration. I could fill the leaves with map patterns of my journey and print them that way. Or I could simply print the solid motifs in different colours and print a few leaf skeletons on top in gold or dark brown.

My final set of motifs for now are the pigeons and birds inspired by my first trip to Liverpool. They are based on Patrick Murphies 'Pigeon Street' so I tried doing some simple line drawings as well as other solid black birds and Pigeons.

Some more Motif ideas to develop...

• Investigate and develop litter motifs continuing from my sketchbook, inspired by Zakee Sharif's piece below.

• Draw and create motifs based on the mushrooms that I found outside a nursing home on my way home, possibly inspired by the pattern below by Marilyn Patrizio.