Wallpaper

Now I am selling the very, very last rolls of the Miramar wallpaper that I made for Engblad & Co, so if you want these on the wall, you have to act now. Below you can read about how it happened when I received the assignment from them. You can order wallpapers with other designs made by me at Photowall.se .

The journey to start creating wallpapers

Exactly six years ago, I was contacted by Boråstapeter, who asked if I wanted to design a wallpaper for their brand Engblad & Co. About six months earlier, I had attended an inspiration day about upcoming trends, and happened to end up talking to some employees from the company there. One of these had then come to mind when their design team was working on the next year's collections.

After all, I had never made a wallpaper pattern, and I remember being incredibly nervous when, at a first meeting with the editorial committee, I took out all my drawings from my folder.

For some reason, at that time I had been into drawing corals, and we decided that I should make an underwater pattern, a tropical underwater world with fish, corals and jellyfish. Maybe it could fit into a collection they had in mind. It would be called Lounge Luxe and bring the idea to sober, slightly retro hotel environments.

I went home and started putting the pieces together into a pattern, but I felt that somehow it was getting a little too childish. The pictures were in and of themselves very nicely drawn, but my colorful fish would fit better as a children's bedroom wallpaper than in a luxurious hotel lobby.
When I have drawn the parts for a pattern, I assemble the pattern report itself in the computer in a program called Photoshop. There you can then move parts, change sizes and colors until you get a good flow in the pattern.

I now tried to tone down the most colorful parts of the pattern, but it didn't turn out well. There is a reason why most people who dive prefer to do it in tropical waters than in the Baltic Sea.

In photoshop there is also a function called Blending mode. By choosing different blending modes, you can change the light, intensity and colors in an image in many ways. So I tried the whole list of blending modes, but it didn't work here either.

Until I got to the very last mode called Luminiscens, then it was bingo. There suddenly all the colors except the background color disappeared, and suddenly my pattern had transformed from a children's bedroom wallpaper into a sober and elegant pattern that fit perfectly into the Lounge Luxe collection. It still stood out among the other patterns. And even though all the colors I used to draw were now gone, there were still my fish and my corals. Only in a completely different way than what I myself first imagined.

At the turn of the year, the Lounge Luxe collection was released from Engblad & Co's catalogue. Miramar, which became the name of my pattern, actually became one of the most popular of the patterns included in the collection. Here can you see what the wallpaper looked like. For those who are interested, there are a few rolls of wallpaper left in our own warehouse. Then its story is all. But the pattern itself remains, and perhaps it will soon be possible to buy as fabric.