A new artwork titled “Element Core (for Sarah)” I created for Sarah, which is something new for me, using seamless repeating patterns in a completely new way.
Originally it was done as a standalone artwork, but I shifted and turned it into a birthday card because I thought art for art’s sake wouldn’t be as appreciated and filed away never to be seen again. I don’t think it’s diminished to give it a different housing though. In fact, it may be more effective; art infiltrating daily life.
Making this drawing was a new process for making a seamless artwork, though it’s carrying on what I’ve done before with the cover of “Dreaming of Uzbekistan” (used also as the tiling background of the Jeffco website), and with Karla’s dress pattern. This time however, math was a lot more important as the repeated elements had to travel around a central point consistently. And I made it a repetition of five elements because I figured a trained chimp could figure out how to do a repetition of four.
I took it into Photoshop for colouring, and while it was originally intended as highly saturated colours of blue, green and yellows, I wasn’t feeling it, and felt it was being a bit too literal in elemental colours. I went with colours for Sarah to go with colours I know she likes and again hopefully make it more accessible. Compromise? Perhaps, but we make decisions throughout the creative process with plenty of different motivations and decisions. It’s no shame to see the goal of the artwork and work towards it. Overall I think it works better this way, though I have my doubts on it’s reception…