During my employment as a furnishing fabric designer in Mumbai, India I worked with various interior clients including John Lewis, Sanderson, Habitat and Pure Fine Fabrics to produce collections of interior textiles.
nursery
products
Aimed at the newborn interiors market, the colour palette for this collection consists of soft pastel hues and was carefully developed based on Scandinavian design direction. Keeping up to date with current trends this project was presented as unisex / genderless.
Working alongside the design director my role for this project encompassed a variety of responsibilities to develop a collection of dobby weave, embroidery, sublimation print, jacquard weave and digital print fabrics. This included concept development, market research, creating original designs, selecting archived artworks, recolouring, setting up designs in repeat, choosing embroidery bases and dye colours.
role
illustration & textile design
nursery
designs
All prints and embroideries for this collection were created by me as original digital illustrations. Some designs, as shown in the far left were selected from the archive, resized and recoloured to fit with the collection concept. All designs required careful consideration of colour placement and were coloured in order to achieve an even balance throughout the collection. I managed the colour consistency throughout the sampling stages to ensure each type of textile e.g. yarn / fabric base / dye colour / print type was accurately matched to the project colour palette.
nursery
process
In order to give you more of an insight into the process and the different methodologies that I use when designing I have included some images here.
To create the characters I first looked at different animal illustration references for toddlers which was the target market. The style needed to be fairly naive using flat colour, simple shapes and exaggerated forms for the body shapes.
Initially sketched out on paper to suggest a rough outline, the drawings were then digitised in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet and then coloured with the chosen palette for the project.
This design was hand painted at the scale that was initially intended for the end design which was a wallpaper panel 2 x 1.5 meter. Creating multiple marks to fill a large area is successful in achieving a sense of irregularity between the motifs in order to create a design that has a hand-created appearance.
residential
textile design
I hand painted the design shown above onto calico in order to achieve a sense of texture and depth. I then put the artwork into repeat and decided on an embroidery type. The design was produced and shown in the collection.
Below is a collection of digital prints based on marbling and terrazzo patterns for upholstery fabrics.
The designs were given to me and I worked in close collaboration with the design team to create and manage the colouring.
