From Sketchbook to Pattern: The Story Behind My New Cornish Collection

I am a romantic at heart, and probably something of a purist too, because I have always loved seeing the evidence of a person in the things they make, from the slight irregularity of a pencil line to the brush mark that has not been smoothed away and the small changes of mind that remain beneath the finished work.

These marks remind us that an object did not simply appear, complete and polished, but passed through someone’s hands and imagination first, developing through observation, experimentation and the many small decisions that form part of making anything original.

Over the past few months, I have been creating a new collection of Hedgerow & Moor designs inspired by the Cornish landscape, and now that the first patterns are available online, I wanted to share some of the process behind them, from the original drawings to the construction of the final repeats.

Beginning with the Cornish landscape

The first design in the collection is called A Walk on the Moor, and its scenes are drawn from the details that remain in my mind after walking through the Cornish countryside rather than from one particular view or recognisable landmark.

A girl gathers wild plants, a hedgehog moves through the undergrowth, a barn owl watches from above and swallows cross the sky, while a crow stands on an old stone and smoke rises from the chimney of a farmhouse in the distance.

These are the smaller details that give the landscape its character, including the birds resting on granite walls, the movement beneath an old hedge, the outline of a farmhouse appearing between trees and the uneven shape of the moor beneath a changing sky.

I draw each element separately before beginning to bring the scenes together, allowing the individual plants, animals and figures to find their place gradually rather than trying to complete the entire pattern in one carefully controlled drawing.

Some sketches are discarded, others are redrawn several times and many change once I begin placing them beside one another, because a drawing that works perfectly on its own does not always sit naturally within a repeating design.

Constructing the repeat is another part of the creative process, because the pictures need to sit together with enough space around them while also joining correctly when the tile is repeated across a larger surface.

It can take a considerable amount of time to find the right arrangement, as a bird may need to move slightly, a branch might need to turn in another direction and a patch of open space that appears insignificant on the working tile can become surprisingly obvious when the design covers an entire wall.

The computer allows me to assemble the repeat, test different arrangements and prepare the finished artwork for printing, but the character of the design still comes from the original drawings and the time spent observing the landscape that inspired them.

Why traditional methods still matter to me

We live in a time when images can be produced almost instantly, while digital tools can remove irregularities, supply ideas and create a finished-looking result before the person using them has had much time to consider what they are trying to say.

I understand the usefulness of technology, and I use it myself to scan drawings, prepare repeat patterns, test colours and see how a design will look across a larger surface, so my concern is not with machines or digital methods simply because they are modern.

What concerns me is how easily the process itself can disappear when everything is designed to be faster, smoother and more convenient, because the connection between the human mind, the hand and the finished work can gradually become less important than producing an immediate result.

Artificial intelligence has made this particularly noticeable, as an image can now be generated from a short instruction by drawing upon an enormous visual language built from the work of other people, often producing something that looks polished without requiring the person requesting it to study the curve of a leaf, understand how a bird carries its weight or return to the same drawing because the first version was not right.

For me, those parts are not irritating obstacles standing between an idea and its finished form, because the looking, drawing, failing, reconsidering and trying again are the work itself, and they are what give the final design its connection to both its maker and the place that inspired it.

Drawing also changes the way I see the natural world, because once I have tried to understand the structure of a rosehip, the shape of a feather or the angle of a swallow’s wing, I notice it differently when I encounter it again.

That connection between looking and making is one of the things I most want to preserve within Hedgerow & Moor, particularly as it becomes increasingly easy to produce images without going through the experience of learning how to see them.

Thinking about William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement

While working on these designs, I have often thought about William Morris and the artists and craftspeople associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, because although they were living through a very different period, they were also trying to understand what could be lost when new technology began to separate people from the things they made.

Victorian Britain had embraced industrial manufacturing, dividing production into smaller and increasingly repetitive tasks while making it possible to produce goods on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable.

Morris believed that the way an object was made mattered, and although he wanted beautiful and useful things to be part of everyday life, he also cared deeply about the relationship between workers and their work.

In 1861, he established Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with a group of artists and craftspeople who produced stained glass, textiles, furniture, embroidery and interior decoration using skilled methods that stood apart from much of the industrial production surrounding them.

The Arts and Crafts movement was not one organisation founded by Morris, and Morris was not opposed to every use of machinery, but his ideas influenced a much wider collection of artists, workshops and societies that questioned what industrial production was doing to craftsmanship, working lives and the objects people brought into their homes.

I often wonder how those makers must have felt as industrialisation altered the world around them and machine-made goods became increasingly dominant, because their desire to protect the value of craft and preserve the connection between the person making an object and the object itself feels remarkably familiar now.

The circumstances are not identical, and I would not claim that my own work carries the broader social ambitions of Morris and his contemporaries, but I recognise their concern that convenience and efficiency can come at the cost of knowledge, skill and human satisfaction.

We are no longer surrounded only by factory-made furniture and mechanically printed textiles, because we now live among an endless supply of digital images, copied ideas and automatically generated material, all competing for attention and often passing before us so quickly that we barely have time to look at them properly.

Creating something slowly from direct observation feels like one small answer to that, not because every modern tool should be rejected, but because the human part of the process is worth protecting.

The history behind toile de Jouy

The structure of A Walk on the Moor takes inspiration from toile de Jouy, a style of pattern built from repeated pictorial scenes that became familiar across textiles, wallpaper and decorative objects.

The name comes from Jouy-en-Josas near Paris, where Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf founded a textile manufactory in 1760, producing finely detailed printed cottons that often depicted people, animals, landscapes, mythology, literature and events from the period.

Early printed textiles relied upon carved wooden blocks, with separate blocks needed for individual colours, while the development of copperplate printing made it possible to reproduce much finer lines and larger pictorial scenes, although these were usually printed in a single colour.

Roller printing later increased the speed and quantity of production, allowing patterned textiles to be manufactured on a much larger scale.

This history is particularly interesting because toile de Jouy was itself closely connected with developing technology, and the fine details we now associate with traditional toile depended upon advances in textile printing.

Traditional design has never existed completely apart from tools, invention or changing methods of production, which is why I do not believe that the answer is to reject every modern process.

What matters to me is deciding which parts of the work should remain human, and ensuring that the technology supports the original drawing rather than replacing the observation and imagination behind it.

I have used the toile format as a way of telling stories through landscape, replacing the fashionable French pastoral scenes of earlier textiles with Cornish hedges, moorland creatures, wild plants, granite, weathered farm buildings and the small moments I have noticed while walking.

Creating a wider Cornish collection

A Walk on the Moor is part of a growing collection of Cornish landscape designs, which are now available online and will continue to develop as I explore other parts of the county through drawing and pattern.

I want the designs to feel connected while allowing each one to carry the character of a particular landscape, because the open moor has its granite, distant farmhouses and broad skies, while the ancient lanes have deep hedges, ferns, foxgloves and glimpses of wildlife between the leaves, and the coast has its own plants, birds, stone and changing light.

Every creature, plant and landscape detail passes through my sketchbook before becoming part of a pattern, rather than being assembled from stock imagery or generated elements, which means that the collection will grow at the natural pace of the work.

From the first line to the finished design

Once a design is printed across wallpaper or another finished surface, much of its earlier history becomes invisible, because the discarded sketches, erased lines and previous arrangements can no longer be seen.

Sharing these photographs is my way of placing some of that history back alongside the finished designs, so that people can see not only what I have made but something of how it came into being.

I want those who choose these patterns for their homes to know that they began with a real drawing and a real place, and that somewhere behind the finished repeat is a walk across the moor, a bird seen on a stone, a farmhouse glimpsed in the distance and a person sitting down afterwards to draw what remained in her mind.

That connection between a person, a place and a finished object is important to me, and it will remain at the centre of the Cornish collection as I add new landscapes, wildlife and stories to it.

VIEW THE CORNISH COLLECTION

Sources and further reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum, Introducing William Morris

• Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts and Crafts: an introduction

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Textile Production in Europe: Printed, 1600–1800

• Musée de la Toile de Jouy, The history of the Oberkampf manufactory and museum