pattern – Song of the Motherland

It’s always a time for pizzazz

Posted on June 19, 2022 by Cal

i always thought it was odd that in fantasy or scifi it is a lot more common to see “ancient clothes + modern setting” than “modern clothes + ancient setting”. i get that they wouldn’t necessarily have modern materials, but design trends seem pretty arbitrary to time.

i’m sure having logos and stuff is a lot harder without screen printing, but you never know. they might have found a workaround with the tools they had. patterns definitely have existed since the earliest days of humanity. peasants flinging mud and dressed in brown is probably more true to monty python than real life, though some colors of fabric and the details of some patterns would undoubtedly make things more expensive.

shoutout to my man alec for letting me unapologetically steal the design of his duds. like I’ve said before, it’s not about coming up with some original idea out of the blue, it is putting your own spin on it in a way that is creative. doing iterations often helps to weed things out and narrow things down.

playing with some more ideas. can you guess which parts are ripoffs? 🙂

We can take it further

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Cal

some of these had specific design goals in mind, but most are just experimentation to see what I like and what I could potentially use. the colors are interesting, but I need to constantly keep in mind what they will look like in monochrome. silhouette and shape tend to play more to not only my strengths but the comic’s strengths more than patterns and colors. patterns especially can get really tedious for me (learn from toriyama and his regrets with those spots on cell’s design! goodness, what a pain). part of me is interested to see some real wild colors and patterns in scifi work, for the sake of having some design notions that are more alien to our current sensibilities. not everything should be ‘cool’. it’s the same principle why marketing is hesitant to be authentic to, say, some historical hairstyles. I say go for it. depending on your design goals, it is often more prudent to make something strange or alien than something cool. i think that is a huge reason why a lot of scifi design also feels so neutered and tame, because many products catering to those sensibilities often ends up forcing a homogeneous result (not to mention that it is difficult to inspire wonder with the familiar).

a few of these designs will most likely show up again in some form in the future. I won’t elaborate, but I am looking forward to what it entails. I still think i can take them much further 😉

Tag: pattern

It’s always a time for pizzazz

We can take it further

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