Project Report - Hannah Matthews

Hannah Matthews
Project Report

The aim of this brief was to produce a set of designs for wallcoverings, based around one of three themes: toile du jouy, hortus botanicus or trompe l’oeil. After looking at a range of existing wallcoverings and designers I chose hortus botanicus because I wanted to experiment with florals, as it was something I hadn’t looked into before, and because floral prints are always popular and in demand. I particularly like the photographic aspect in some of the pieces, like the one shown below by Jo Pierce:

I also really liked the vintage-y, hand made element in the work of designers such as Claire Coles (above right), so I wanted to incorporate some stitch and vintage looking fabric into my designs. I was less keen on the block colour prints and really bright colours.

I visited the ‘Putting on the Glitz’ exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery and was interested to find that many of the early wallpapers are extremely similar in their designs and imagery to the wallpapers that are popular now (see below), especially the large scale florals and metallic effect paper. The most significant difference is the way the early wallcoverings were made. Often the processes were long and laborious, and the materials used very expensive, meaning that only the wealthy could afford such luxuries, and making wallcoverings a symbol of wealth and status. Now wallpaper ranges appear at every level of the market and are much more affordable, meaning that they are more a symbol of personal taste and style. This is largely due to developments in technology which allow large scale printing and mass production of wallcoverings, as opposed to the early methods which were all done by hand and block printed on small individual sheets of paper.


I the project started by collecting a range of flowers including lilies, roses, chrysanthemums, orchids, tulips, daffodils and sunflowers, some of which I bought and some of which I was got free at the florist, as there wasn’t much in the garden due to the time of year. I photographed them first using both an SLR and a normal point and shoot camera and I took about 300 photographs in all. I experimented with different backgrounds including a plain wall, the garden, and I also tried using the light box which made the colours come out a lot brighter. I played with composition photographing the flowers both on their own and in bunches and I took both close up photos and photos of the full flower which would be useful as images to stitch from. The roses made for some really nice pictures as they are a classic, easily recognizable shape but I particularly liked the sunflowers because they are a less obvious flower to use and I love the colour and its positive effect on your mood. I also really liked the photos of the chrysanthemums against the window because of the more subtle colours and the way the light from outside comes through the petals to bring out the colour. I was less keen on the lilies, I just found them a bit boring although the close up photos of the inside of the lilies were quite interesting.

I then went on to some drawing, which is not my strong point as I’m extremely slow so I started in a little book using pen and pencil and tried a couple of different styles which came out ok they just weren’t very interesting, so I tried a bigger drawing of a sunflower which was a lot nicer but it did take me forever. I also tried some ink drawings, which were not great but were definitely more interesting. I then looked at the artist Elesworth Kelly, who does some lovely simple line drawings which I did my own version of on acetate with an acetate pen.

I used photoshop to create a composition using my photographs. I selected the flower shapes and experimented with the scale and colour levels. I did the whole composition in black and white first but I wanted to add some colour which I did by duplicating the layers with the sunflowers and changing the top layer to grayscale, then overlayed it and changed the opacity to let the colour show through, which worked better than just using the original colour of the photos because it was more subtle so it worked better with the grayscale flowers. I was really pleased with the end result but I think it would look better on a larger scale and it was entirely computer generated and I wanted a more hand made feel to my work.

After looking at the work of Claire Coles I started using my line drawings of roses as templates for stitching round onto some fabrics I had collected. I liked them but didn’t know how to incorporate them into my work so I put them in my sketchbook and worked into the pages with stitch using some continuous line drawings of butterflies from the archive visit, and then tried to stitch in some text. I liked it but I was stuck again so I went back to my PDP personal file for some inspiration, and found a piece by Sophie Toulouse (shown below) I loved the simplicity of the ink drawing of the woman’s head and shoulders and that minimal lines had been used but you could still tell what the image was. I went through copies of Vogue and made ink drawings from the models on the advertisements, I used vogue because I wanted the long neck and angular lines that models always seem to have, to try and give the drawings an elegant look. I tried out a variety of poses and levels of detail to see what worked best and found that minimal detail with a variety of line density looked good. Next I tried to imitate the way Sophie Toulouse had painted flowers onto the woman’s neck and although I like the result it looked like the work of Sophie Toulouse rather than my own work so I blew some of the images up and exposed them onto a screen. I screen-printed the images, both individually and in groups, experimenting with composition and overlapping. I kept to black ink because I wanted it to look simple and sophisticated.

After doing a few prints I looked at ways of adding the floral element in a way that would look more ‘hand done’. I tried making stencils and using spray paint to add the floral element, which I thought looked too harsh and stark compared to my other pieces, even when I only used a light coating of spray paint. I also tried making more stitched roses on vintage fabric but on a much larger scale, which I thought worked really well with the print. Lastly I tried cutting up some of my flower photographs and collage-ing them onto the screen-print which looked really nice although given more time I would have used bigger photos.

Going back to the idea of flowers on the human figure from Sophie Toulouse’s work I decided to try projecting my photoshop composition onto an actual person and photographing it. I asked Caroline to be my model because she has the long neck and angular jaw line that I was trying to achieve in my ink drawings. I had doubts as to whether the flowers would show up clear enough but it worked really well, especially the lines of the rose and I was really pleased with the photographs. The main downside to he photos was Caroline’s shadow on the projection screen which blocked out some of the flower images but unfortunately she couldn’t stand close enough to the screen to avoid getting the shadow.


In conclusion, I really loved this project because I feel that my own style is starting to show through in my work a lot more, and it really gave me a chance to experiment with combining different medias. I was pleased with my outcomes but I feel that I could still develop them all a lot more so maybe I should have limited myself to a smaller range of ideas and spent longer on each one, for instance I would have liked to do more work on my photoshop composition and use more stitch on my screen printed pieces. I would also have liked to have experimented more with smaller scale stencils and different colours of spray paints. But overall I was really pleased with my final ideas and I feel they really reflect the sort of style I like.