Screen Printed Collection

After some very busy days in the print room I managed to create a completely screen printed collection. I am very happy with what I have produced as it isn't very similar to something I have done before. I believe these prints would fit in well with a high end market similar to Holly Fulton, and helped me work in a limited number of colours like I hoped it would.

I have made use of foiling and stenciling within this collection, both of which I haven't had much experience of myself. I will definitely be using both of these methods in future work. I also made the decision to add diamonds into some of the designs. This is because while research Art Deco I found there to be a lot of diamond and triangle shapes present. I think this really added to my prints and contrasted nicely with the distorted motifs.

In terms of garment shape and context, I looked at higher end collections and found a lot of boxy and structured shapes. My favourites were Holly Fulton's dress shapes and Prada spring 2011. 

This is why I collaged with squares and then went onto choose a T-Shirt dress as a final garment. For this collection I only wanted to give visualizations of what my prints could look like, so I chose a basic garment to experiment on based on Prada and Holly Fulton. I think this worked really well and the prints work best on a basic garment. 

I found doing this screen print collection really interesting, especially because it changed my context. It really made me think about print placement and the use of colours together, as I had to actively choose the colour before I printed it. If I decide to continue this project through Unit X, I think I would try and take my screen prints further and maybe turn them into actual garments for a lookbook. 

Michael Kidner Live Brief

For my live brief I chose to do the Michael Kidner Brief. 

I chose this because his work is very bold, colourful and geometric which is similar to the work I have been developing in my Self Initiated Brief.
I began by looking at his work for inspiration on colour and shape. A few of his works only make use of primary colours. I wanted to take this into my work as my self initiated brief projects are made up of a larger number of colours, I wanted to limit myself to just the three. The print I have created is made up of shapes inspired by Michael Kidner's works which I have lifted and placed onto grid lined paper, in order to keep structure.

Collage was my main process during this brief. I felt the need to do this physically rather than on photoshop so that I could keep a textural feel to my work, which I think was successful in the end.
The brief said to consider scale, which is something I don't always do. This is why I printed my design on the wide format printer so that I could see it on a larger scale. This was very useful when it came to making my scarf visualisations.

 As my work is usually intended for fashion, I can see my design being used on a silk scarf in particular. Overall I am happy with the work I have produced in response to the Michael Kidner brief, in particular the use of bright primary colours together.

Second Collection

I started to research geometric prints and garments for my second collection when I came across Holly Fulton. I have loved her as a designer for a long time and her prints are very bold and geometric. Furthermore they sometimes consist of only one or two colours, which is one of the skills I wanted to challenge myself with during this unit. She is a designer for a high end audience, and as I am taking inspiration from her my designs could end up for a high end market too. I normally aim for a high street audience so this could be an exciting change for me and encourage me to think differently about my context.

Holly Fulton draws the designs herself and then digitally manipulates them into patterns that mimic Art Deco inspirations. I want to take inspiration from this as I haven't worked on such a strong, geometric shaped print theme before. I am going to use the same visual research as my digital collection in order to keep my work related to my digital designs.

With Holly Fulton designs as inspiration, I drew up some simple black and white geometric designs from my distortion visual research. Although there are similarities with my digital collection I feel these drawings are different enough to produce a very different outcome. The thicker and bolder lines will hopefully help me imitate Fulton's theme. Furthermore, I am excited to make use of different techniques such as foiling which digital printing cannot do for me.

Change Of Plan

Over the holidays I have been working on my prints and trying to enable them to incorporate both screen and digital print techniques.

I really wanted this idea to work and I tried many different ways of putting imagery together where part could be screen printed and part could be digitally printed. However this hasn't gone as well as I would have liked it to. Although I received positive feedback from my peers I myself am not happy with the outcomes, some of which are below.

I feel that the imagery doesn't work well together and it doesn't portray my distortion theme as well as I would like. I have spent a lot of my time trying to get this to work with (in my opinion) not enough success. Unfortunately because of this I have decided to alter my plans for the unit.
In one of my last tutorials we discussed creating an all new collection from more simple and geometric imagery, taken from the visual research I have already collected. This gave me the idea of creating one digital collection and one screen collection that take my visual research into different directions. This way I can still show skills in both processes, just in two collections instead of one.

I now plan to do some market and designer research for my second collection and begin drawing for screen. For my CP3 Extended Essay I researched the differences between screen and digital printing and the ways in which we can design for both. I am planning on using this research to aid my designing for the two different printing methods.