food inspired

Good food provides not only nourishment, but if allowed, it also regales us with great sources of inspiration, including of course striking colour palettes.

Here are three examples:

BAJA FISH TACO
Queen West Street houses many of our favourite haunts in Toronto. Here you can find excellent shopping, entertaining and most certainly, food! Grand Electric is the perfect example of the latter. I'm not sure what the story behind the restaurant is, but it has (along with Maizal) the best Mexican food in town. With an eclectic ambiance, and somewhat loud music, they offer a most delicious fish taco (their key lime dessert is simply spellbinding). When my order of tacos arrived the first time we visited, I found them so quaint that my immediate reaction was to take a picture. E looked at me suspiciously since I hardly ever take pictures of food as in my opinion, food tends to photograph unfavourably.

Grand Electric has a section on one of its walls decorated with some Lucha Libre paraphernalia, which I thought would tie-in very well with the Grobet post. The tacos image depict, on the left, a chicken taco, on the right, a fish taco.

LW'S SALAD

One of the advantages of working in a very creative environment, is being surrounded by very creative people who effortlessly make art out of any medium at hand. This image showcases LW's lunch salad. She was giving the final touches to it when I happened to walk by and see it. I stopped on my tracks and commented on the beauty of it, a few seconds later, I was documenting it for posterity. It was perfectly composed, all elements in harmonious balance.

SUNDAY PANCAKES

Though not exclusively, Sunday seems to be the preferred day of the week for pancakes (always made from scratch). We all tend to eat them very differently: E likes them with just a bit of butter. F enjoys them with the superb maple syrup we have been treating ourselves to since living in Toronto (culinarium sells the best in town, seriously). I'm keen on sprinkling them with powder sugar and lots of strawberries.

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After cutting the strawberries this is what I'm always left with: An intriguing  possibility of motifs in the form of strawberry tops arranged in the semblance of a design unit. Today I decided to run with it, here is the resulting design process:

Strawberry tops on cutting board.

With the aid of Photoshop, the strawberry tops exist now without the background and are ready to be put in repeat. A straight repeat moved things along expeditiously during this initial process--I gave myself 10 minutes to resolve the rapport.

This was a very quick, fun, repeat exercise, all with the aid of Photoshop.

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The next steps consider the motifs themselves, the goal being to push the concept further to fully re-contextualize the design. Some Photoshop filters were used. It is important to disclose that I am not a fan of using filters (in my view, most images altered with filters tend to have a  somewhat  "photoshopy/filtery/ready-made" look), however, in certain instances, they can be convenient sketching tools.
In order to bring the content of this post full circle, the 3 food palettes were brought into play as the platform to generate 3 colourways out of the basic design, which is this one:

Strawberry Tops. ©Ana Galindo for Inkfibre

E pointed out a very under-the-microscope look which granted a fresh start to a design that still had a long way to go. Needless to say, the results were quite unexpected mostly considering they were worked under a very tight (self imposed) time restriction.

Palette: Baja Fish Taco. Design: Strawberry Tops. ©Ana Galindo for Inkfibre.

Palette: LW's Salad. Design: Strawberry Tops. ©Ana Galindo for Inkfibre.

Palette: Sunday Pancakes. Design: Strawberry Tops. ©Ana Galindo for Inkfibre.

The dynamism foisted during this task was very enjoyable and reminiscent of my university years when we worked on "repentinas", meaning a "mini/micro charrette", in this case with no collaborative element.

Last notes on the exercise: End-use and scale need to be determined (I see the repeat at least 15") and I would like to try it as a half-drop repeat (though as a full-drop is working well). If it were to be screenprinted, it would be in at least 3 colours, resolving the films by hand.

elements of textile print design: tessellations

I have been pondering about this particular topic for a while now, given that it is important to delve a bit in it while delivering introductory lectures and demos in repeat pattern. The general perception seems to be that tessellations are a very intricate form of design. The fact of the matter is that some of them can be impossibly complicated, but in terms of repeat pattern design, they tend to be rather simple and straight forward.

The immediate reference most purists think of whenever tessellations are mentioned are the  incredible mosaics in the ancient cultures of the Middle East. An excellent example of this influence is found in Granada, Spain.

Mosaic from the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain

The mosaics at the Alhambra inspired the tessellation work of M.C. Escher, the ultimate Shape Meister according to a more contemporary school of thought.

M. C. Escher, Pegasus, tessellation 105

Of course, those involved in the textile arts will think of tessellations in terms of quilting patterns.

Madeleine quilt (detail) by Kate Busby.

What most of us refer to as a design unit (the bread and butter in the discipline of textile print design) is, in reality, a simple tessellation unit. Though in printed fabrics the outline that defines the design unit is usually not evident, the tessellation is truly stipulated by the limiting lines of said unit (horizontal and vertical) within a precisely measured coordinate system.

From left to right: 1-Tessellation unit or design unit (established as a straight repeat, a.k.a. square repeat, a.k.a. side repeat, a.k.a. full drop repeat). 2-Design units in repeat, side, by side, by side, by side. Tiled or tessellated on the horizontal and vertical planes (tessella-Latin-tile).

Design units printed in repeat without the defining outline, except for that at the top left, which references the limiting lines of the tessellation [the example is another variation of pears, ©ana galindo for inkfibre].

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Sting's Desert Rose song with Cheb Mami (from his album Brand New Day, 1999) has what I always perceived as an "Alhambra" sound (that is my immediate Middle East reference, though it is in Spain). A true tessellation of talent and cultures.

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Reference material worth your while:

• Book, Escher on Escher by M.C. Escher / Translated from the Dutch by Karin Ford
  A glimpse into Escher's work in his own words. Succinct, eloquent, enlightening, I found it quite reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Six Memos For The Next Millenium. An excellent reminder of why we want to pay attention to detail and why we want to create something remarkable. There is a Toronto connection.

  

• Blog post by George Woideck, click here.