The design

The design of the benches have gone really well - thanks to the amazing amounts of wonderful drawings and ideas shared by all the schools and groups involved in the project. This page tells the story of how I came up with the final designs. 




There are two benches to design, with only a handful of measurements to work to. This is because I have had to order the benches to be made specially for the square. They take about 6 weeks to make! So the without the benches in my studio, I have been working to technical drawings and measurements. Here is a picture of the bench that will be made for this project.

It's about 1.8 metres long, so there will be plenty of room for lots of people to enjoy the seat at the same time! It has soft curved edges, which will make it comfy for the sitter... but harder for me to mosaic around the corners!!! 

So although it doesn't look too exciting in it's current form, I plan to make a mosaic picture that will be placed on the top of the bench, and also wrap down the sides. Here is what I mean:

So getting to work with the designs, I had to look at all the drawings from everyone and pick out some details, and common themes and work out the main key ideas to include into the final artworks. This was a tough job! 

I also took on board what Hythe Youth Club and Aged UK talked about, and that was they were concerned about sitting on face of royalty! Fair point! So regretfully I have taken the decision to not include any of our wonderful portraits, but I have taken a few elements of the kings and queens, like colours, medals, crowns and snuck these into the design - Can you spot them?

So here we have the first design for the benches (no colour)

I've had to design the benches looking from above, and with the concept that you may sit either side of the picture so you can see something in the artwork from any angle!


Since designing the benches, I may change the ship's shape.  I have found another brilliant drawing from Palmarsh which looks a little like the Cinque Port ship that actually sailed from the Hythe port for the great battle. Here is a picture of the ship and a picture from Palmarsh. It would be great to have this accuracy to the artwork!

So now I had to think about colour.  I have a limited palette of colours - because the tiles I need to use in this project only have a certain amount of colours.  Here is my colour palette I have to work to:

So here is what I came up with....