Further pattern development- stencil creation

I need to start to give the patterns that I am creating some structure. I have worked out my intentions for the general feel of the patterns for the building. They will be repeat patterns using one stencil. The stencil can be overlapped, tessellated  rotated etc, (not scaled as I think this would get confusing and also it would be unpractical to have more than one stencil size). I need to think about the actual quality of the stencils. They have to have a rough edge to them. I do not want them to be clean geometric shapes. I want them to look rough and ready, unpolished. 

This is an attempt at creating a stencil for pattern creation. It is a pattern that I found on one of the historic buildings in Fargo Village- a piece of roof detailing.  I quite like the roughness of the lines. It has been created by fine tuning the live trace tool in illustrator. I think that it could do with neatening up a little but overall I like the texture and overall rough and ready quality it has. I am going to experiment with using it as a symbol to create patterns. 

This is looking very interesting. I like the intricacy of the pattern. Perhaps this is something that I will explore in the final pattern designs? Perhaps the patterns could be very beauitiful, intricate things and the stencil that is used to construct them be very small?

I am starting to think now about how these stencils can be produced as final objects. I have recreated this stencil. I have now taken into consideration that it is in fact a stencil and cannot be composed of elements which have elements inside them (obveously because they would fall out of the stencil). I have also heavily simplified the stencil. I inverted the image so that I could get a trace of the negative. This has produced a more interesting symbol. I like the fact that they are hard to tell what they actually are an image of. 

These patterns with this new symbol are working really well. i created a repeat pattern that I then made into strips. These strips have been overlapped with interesting results. I still like the idea of creating stencils for the numbering of the warehouses. I think that this is an idea that is going to continue through the development of the project. 

Now that I have a way of using the stencils, I am going to construct the final stencil ideas.