himHallows

himHallows is the working name of Paul Hallows, an artist and multi-discipline creative practitioner based at the Engine House in Salford's Islington Mill.

himHallow’s art practice is focused on creating patterns of scenes of human activity using hand illustrated elements and textures. The resulting patterns are risograph printed and tiled to create the larger repeating piece. The patterns take inspiration from the repetitions that occur in various real world settings around us, using subjects such as tower cranes, shipping containers and parasols on the beach.

Contact via email to commission (or license) a pattern, or for any other information at hello@himhallows.studio

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⏷ On the Engine House balcony

The Process

↓ Scroll through pattern to see process

Planning and Illustration

A pattern starts from a rough composition to which the hand drawn elements can be planned, finished and added to. Each tile is designed to be a standalone scene that repeats on every edge, this scene should feel somewhat rooted in reality, only becoming less so as it is repeated. The aim of every pattern is to make the point of repetition subtle, in the case of Tower Cranes Study II, each crane should have height and not be bound by the tile it is in.

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⏷ Tower crane pattern in the planning stages

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Composition

With the illustrated elements in place, the composition is further developed with different textures used to build body and shading. This composition is created at the start to be risograph print ready; layers are added to with the interaction of the inks and textures in mind.

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⏷ Combing textures within the composition

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Print & Assembly

The final pattern is formatted into separate colour layers and put through the risograph printer. After a print run, the patterns for tiling are trimmed to size (mainly by hand to ensure correct alignment) and then assembled. For SCALE, each pattern was assembled from up to 100 tiles, creating works 3 metres tall.