Royal Armouries Museum Leeds

The second part of this unit required us to visit the Royal Armouires Museum in Leeds. Housing arms and armour from all over the globe and and exhibiting warfare from many different times. There are many different exhibitions on display including the Oriental Gallery and The Swords of Middle Earth.

I feel a lot of the items on display were more applicable to students specialising in weave or knit, however, I did take inspiration from markings and thin linings. Rather than looking at the image as a whole, I zoomed into certain sections to highlight individual areas of interest. This enabled me to produce simple drawings that could be used as my motifs to form overall prints.

Although I am not particularly interested in warfare as a whole, I do feel the trip was beneficial for me to visualise and take inspiration from objects and translate this into a design form.

Scanned in pages of my sketchbook:

The markings produced have been highlighted by the use of two different shades of metallic acrylic paint. I think this works well and ties in with the classical depiction of metal material used in a lot of armour.

Further experimentation has allowed me to apply different media to create backgrounds using acrylic paint and pastel colours. using photoshop I have scanned these in and used different layering techniques to achieve powerful finished backgrounds. Layering my motifs on top which have been taken from my initial drawings in my sketchbook. On reflection I think I have also been inspired by previous things I have seen. For example at the Maritime Museum, there was a replica of an African mud hut complete with markings and motifs on the walls. I believe this has been partly inspirational to this unit as a whole.

Above are two digital print designs from my collection mixing together my motifs with hand painted backgrounds created on photoshop. Both these designs compliment each other and are variations of a similar theme.

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