Anyone who knows me at art school, will know that screen printing is not my forte. This was proven even more so with our repeat print project. I don’t lie when I tell you that this project made three girls cry, one including me. It just shows how difficult this project was for us.

It all started with us trying to create a motif to repeat. This motif was actually called an ‘absolute unit’. I based mine off my friends head for some reason. I genuinely have no idea why or where it came from as there was no inspiration or references in my sketchbook about it. You can tell from this last sentence that I had absolutely no inspiration for this unit that we had to make. This led to a project that I wasn’t really interested in and made it all the harder to create.

The brief for the project was to create a repeat print for an interior purpose. We also had to learn how to construct a repeat print and had to learn the theory behind it too. This consisted of being given packs to help us know the differences between brick repeats, symmetrical units and diagonal patterns.

The whole thing turned out to be very mathematical and the only way to figure it out and learn how to do it properly, was to print and cut out several units and lay them out on a large piece of paper, with a large ruler in hand. I ended up doing several designs like this for my screen.

I can hear some of you saying, why didn’t you just use Photoshop to help?

Well,

a) We weren’t allowed to.

b) The whole point behind the project was to do this manually so we could understand repeat prints better, rather than letting technology do it for us.

We were not defeated by this project at all! In fact, all of us made some rather lovely repeat prints done in several colour ways to suit our interior brief.