The following is the progress on my study of alternating figure/ground and subsequent pattern development. The concept of alternating figure/ground is best described as when you have a figure(object) and a ground(background) in the picture but you're mind can't figure out which is which, so your mind alternates back and forth between perceiving one color as the ground, one color as the object, and vise-versa.
Above are my initial attempts at alternating figure/ground. I used a bike pump to find my unit form, focusing on the nozzle. Not much to note here-none of these resemble my final unit form-but it's interesting to see the progress I made.
Unit form development and initial pattern experimentation. With a better understanding of the concept of figure/ground, here I was trying to show that the concept can be demonstrated with varying degrees of complexity...
...But in the end decided to keep it simple. The design in the middle became my final unit form. It's the only form that experienced almost no changes from the time I made it. In my opinion it's definitely my best work here.
These are the three final pattern designs. I tried to vary the size of the unit form within the pattern to make it more interesting. I decided to alternate the movement of the patterns with the diagonal-radial-diagonal format.
Finally, here is a exploration of one of my patterns with a monochromatic(one color, different values of it)color scheme.
If you'd like to see more example of alteration figure/ground, check out this Dropmark
If you'd like to see more in progress pictures, check out this Dropmark
