How Escher Was Born

I started thinking about the pattern that would then become 'Escher' back in August while visiting Parque de Serralves in Porto - or Oporto if you prefer.

Anyway, while walking in the park I saw one big pond. It was one of those green water ponds that lends an aura of abandon yet irresistible charm to every Portuguese park and public garden built before the 1960’s. This pond in particular was covered with whitish leaves that floated on its surface under the hot midday sun. I felt compelled to snap a photo of the scene before leaving. It reminded me of something I was unable to recall.

After transferring the weekend’s photos to my computer back home I was finally able to remember what that photo reminded me of.

My mother is a Maths teacher and got herself a big book on M.C. Escher’s work many years ago. I’ve found myself many times looking at its pages as a teen being particularly smitten by his optic illusions. Actually ‘Three Worlds’ pales in comparison to most of Escher’s body of work in the sense that is just… pleasant to look at. It was not technically difficult to create for a draughtsman at his level. Nonetheless it is one of my favourite works of his.

One or two weeks after visiting Serralves I had to move to Zagreb. Between the typical hecticness of moving countries, transitioning from holiday-mood to work-mood, sorting stuff out and figuring how to make a pattern out of floating leaves without the whole thing looking flat and boring… time passed.

Fast forward to October and I’d tried designing leaves from memory and realistic ones from photo references. Brush drawn leaves, pencil leaves and cut leaves. Oak leaves, linden leaves, birch leaves, maple leaves. Leaves I could not name.

I finally set on leaves drawn from memory with sumi ink after learning to draw each specific type of leaf from observation. What could seem like a compromise from the outside was what actually ended up working without looking childish or static. Go figure.

But I still had a problem - I wanted depth. Correction - I needed depth.

The moodboard I created for this project, a print pattern for home-textiles.

For the background I tried designing carps, subaquatic plants and abstract shapes both opaque and in the form of ink washes however I wasn’t happy with any of the results I was getting. Neither was I happy looking at size of the pile of paper with failed experiments.

Then all of a sudden I remembered about water ripples. How could I have forgotten?

After some tests I was able to produce decent results, specially considering that I would not need to close the circles since they would be partially hidden by the top layer with leaves.

By then it was time to assemble my pattern in Photoshop. I won’t lie, it was a lot of work and after completing the leaves layer in repeat mode it just looked as busy and rigid as cobblestones… so the next day I redid the repeat all over again - and it payed off in the end! On the other hand the ripple’s layer was much quicker and easier to create than I had initially anticipated. Like we say in Portugal ‘tudo está bem quando acaba bem’.

Then the most awaited and feared moment arrived: the time to test the repeat. I applied some greens to the water layer and a whitish tone to the leaves and clicked ‘fill with’. I just had to move the background a little to get a more balanced result. Phew!

I refined the colour palette at the end as I usually do. I initially had a green and white colour scheme in mind just like the waterscape that inspired this design and at the end set on emerald hues and cream. After applying the colours to my rapport and testing again I sighed with relief - and pride too I must admit.

In the next post I’ll talk more about about this pattern’s alternate colourways.

Stay tuned!

Cândida
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Design Process, One-Off, Home TextilesCândida Brites9 November 20202 Comments