Photos for Textiles

These pictures may be useful as potential sources for textiles courses and other art work. The list will be built up over time as I find new images. The pictures are all taken by me and some are worked up using effects and tools in picture manipulation software. They are taken at different times and places, and are a resource for further work, possibly in as foundations for drawings and design.

Walking around the area I live in I find interesting details that lend themselves to thinking about textiles, such as weathered leading, flaking paint breaking away from rusty surfaces, or other rusty elements.

When leaves fall in the autumn they create good overall cover for different surfaces. Here are some on a wet asphalt road surface after rain. I liked the sun reflecting in the water with the colour from the leaves shining through.

I was working on the textile samples the sun shone onto my work table and the plastic pencil case cast interesting light reflections onto the table

A bit of a snowy ploughed field near my parents' home

I had a go at colouring and manipulating an images of fungus using software effects. These worked quite well, they suggest some sort of surface pattern:

Shadows on surfaces outside can be quite effective. I see that some designers are now using these effects on wall coverings. I have included one here, there are many, many more possibilities - sheets drying, weeds along pavements and so on:

I have a small camera but managed to catch the moon, even if it was dark and I had to take many pictures that were not so good, this one seems OK:

A couple of texture images:

To practice design techniques for the course I had a go at playing with colour and cropping for the next set of images of a pine forest

More rusty bits.....seems a quite photogenic material. In creative embroidery degenerating materials on surfaces seems to have been a favourite motif for a while now. These images also suggest patterns from the metal structure.

I saw these synthetic carrier sacks when out on a walk. Not sure what they contained, building rubble I supposed. Anyway, en masse they look interesting - volume and scale suggests something monumental.

People use paper tacks to put up posters. They take the posters away, but leave the tacks and staples in place. This creates a random pattern of more or less rusty metal bits, in more or less dense areas. 

Lines created by metal window bars at Paddington station

Weathered wooden posts at a beach. They had been under water and had then dried out. I have several variations of these photos of posts, the lines in the wood are strong and suggest stresses yet seem to have left the wood fairly strong for the time being.