I was recently commissioned by UP! in Preston Lancashire, to work on an exciting new project. UP! is a project partnership between They Eat Culture & JCR Creative. UP was looking for designer makers and artists to develop a range of beautiful, creative and exciting new products from a wide range of unwanted materials which are donated to the project. My material was fabric. A lot of the fabric that has been donated is heavily patterned (floral patterns etc) and busy geometric patterns. I designed and illustrated a set of patterns related to the county of Lancashire.

I wanted to make a product familiar to the Lancashire public, as the products will be sold within the county. Summing a county up in an illustration is a hard task to narrow down, however I like a challenge! I started to think what would be familiar to people of the region? Settling upon three main themes to work upon. The region offers the public several iconic places of interest to visit and experience.

I set about illustrating and designing patterns based upon specific icons to represent each theme - Heritage - I settled upon designing a pattern incorporating Lancashire's iconic cotton mills to represent the regions heritage. Wildlife - I produced an illustration of the migrating pink footed geese flock, that frequent the region to places such as Martin Mere at this time of year. Entertainment - I produced an illustration using one of Lancashire's most iconic entertainment symbols - Blackpool tower.

All of the patterns I designed and illustrated, are specifically designed to work upon 'loud'/heavily patterned donated fabric. I really enjoyed how the fabric that I had to use for the project boosted the overall designs I produced.

That is the beauty of over printing a 1 colour design on to a pre made pattern. As you will see from the latter pictures, the patterns work differently on different patterns. More about the commission here.