circles and stripes

I was searching for inspiration in some old selvedge magazines and I came across this photo of a chinese skirt advertising a textile exhibition.

I thought it was really beautiful and I got slightly addicted to looking at it, hypnotised! 

I wanted to start a new project with no preconceptions - to just start on a path and see where it ends up.  So I started mark making.

I tried using all sorts of pens, pencils, paints, coffee and even nail varnish - there really isn't enough neon in the world for my liking!   

This is the sort of thing I came up with.  I quite liked the idea of eventually turning the circles into a skirt for a model or doll to wear.  I'm not too sure how far I'll get with that though as it's really time consuming and I'm really impatient.  I did play around with using the circles and stripes technique as part of a character design.  

I liked the fact that my circles weren't perfectly round - they had a much more organic feel to them.  I found the drawing process quite therapeutic which is always an added bonus.

I made a mock up of my 3d idea, it wasn't brilliantly executed but I was happy with the process and I worked out how I would do it better next time.

I've been thinking about what to enter for the inkygoodness beer mat competition - all you have to do is turn a beer mat into a character.  So I played around with my new techniques and came up with this.  I'm going to post it off tomorrow.  Exciting!! Fyi  it's a beer mat cat in a hat (just in case you couldn't tell).