Freelance illustrator and surface pattern designer Augusta Akerman came up with the idea for her design The Great Migration whilst watching the BBC series Nature’s Greatest Events, and it was exhibited as a wallpaper at last year’s New Designers One Year On exhibition.
“I began by sketching whilst watching the part of Nature’s Greatest Events that concentrated on the wildebeest following the rain across the Serengeti grasslands,” she says. “For the next stage of the process I repainted the initial drawings keeping to a simple colour palette I thought best reflected the atmosphere of Tanzania’s Serengeti and Maasai Mara.
“These individual paintings were then scanned into the computer, assembled and then repeated in Adobe. The assembling of the whole repeat tile took the most time as I just dived in – I’ve learnt my lesson and now always place a rough plan as my first layer in Photoshop.”
Augusta graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2008 with a BA Hons in Fine Art Photography and studied for an MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Art in 2013. “I try to create designs that not only celebrate our natural environment but add to our knowledge of the world around us through storytelling and illustration,” she concludes.
This article was published in the September 2015 issue of Furniture News magazine.
