The Mosaic print as our Cloth Edition Pillow in Jade.
We’re starting off our Print Profile series with the Mosiac print, a pattern that we've been playing with in different iterations since 2018. This series is dedicated to sharing the behind the scenes of how we design and construct our prints.
The Mosaic design is printed on a natural linen with colorful squares patterning across. Its squares are featured in a tile-like grid, spaced graciously but not perfectly, to emulate the mosaic tiling in opus regulatum (the Latin name for the Greek and Roman mosaic grid in which the tesserae of tile grout lines are aligned both vertically and horizontally).
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Transfer from the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, Bequest of Henry W. Haynes, 1912
Once we had an idea of the form and pattern layout, we had to create a map of colors. From a glance, any of our Mosaic prints look intuitive. They are built out of five individual colors, arranged in a repeating pattern that is printed in five layers.
In order to create the five color world, each color had to be considered individually. Not from a design magazine, or a Pantone collection, this effect was achieved by taking it all the way back to color theorist Josef Albers.
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963. English edition. Published by Yale University Press, New Haven.
In his work, Albers explains how color and our perception of it, is quite fluid. He created practices of cutting out color pieces of paper and arranging colors next to one another and practicing seeing shifts as you take one color card away and replace it with another.
Moving from simple to complex by using color cards (Color Aid if any of you went to art school) you start with one color at a time, as Albers taught. By isolating each color, you're allowing the study each interaction. As another color card is added, a new problem or solution is created. How does the color change with each pairing? As we built our way up to five colors to arrange in our pattern, each iteration was a process and a consideration.
Behind the scenes for an upcoming limited edition art print of Mosaic Jade
The piecing together, with bits of color paper everywhere, slowly but methodically attains a balance, that for this print achieves an easy harmony and lowers the impact of the graphic quality of the forms.
The Mosaic has expanded to six different color ways, using this method, all of which are five color worlds. Using tile forms to emulate an ongoing mosaic, the gently laid out color repeat defies the jarring nature of this kind of topography in color.
Find more of this pattern in our collection of Mosaic here in our shop!
