No More Animal Skins!!!

Some of you may know that I have been designing animal prints for a London based textile company called Bay and Brown for some time now. I should mention that I don't design animal prints exclusively (they are occasionally punctuated with geos and textures) but it does feel like that sometimes!!
Lucky for me it looks like the animal skins are finally on their way out (some may argue they were never really in) which means that i can finally get what i feel is a well deserved break from them!
I was sent an image today of a dress and jacket combo by felder felder which is completely stunning! here it is......

So basically my job now is to interpret that design for the highstreet.
To me it looks pretty architectural so i figured i'd peruse the net for images of buildings. My idea was to find a fairly modern building and crop it down so that it could be mirrored and repeated. I found the Lloyd's building and figured it would be perfect since it has some pretty unusual shapes on it that would make the design interesting.
If you're wondering what the Lloyd's building looks like, check it out below.

So, what i've done here is pretty simple, i just changed the colour mode of the image above left to grayscale and simplified it using the levels with Photoshop.





After cropping and mirroring the image i re-coloured it to create the final design. This was a pretty quick one, it took all of about 10 mins but it served as a good visual for me to work from when i came to transfer the design to silk with dye and discharge.

If you're new to my blog and are wondering what the hell discharging could possibly be aside from a description of poor health please click here to find out more!