Unit X | Designer Research

During our tutorial last week Louise suggested that my drawings would work best as a strong placement print. I did some research on designers and placement prints to collect ideas on where and how they might be placed, before I start experimenting with my own designs.

I took a liking to three collections in particular; Tom Ford SS14, Holly Fulton Spring 11 and KENZO SS14.

I like these three collections in particular because of the shapes and drapes of the fabrics. Also, Tom Ford and Kenzo are largely black and white in colour, which makes them really relatable to our work.
Tom ford's collection in particular relates well to my concept of bandages with the lines incorporated in the print. I love the drape in the fabrics Holly Fulton used and the structure of the garments in the KENZO collection.

Unit X | Visual Research and Drawing

Taking inspiration from my chosen artists, I began to draw from my photographs. Finding media was particularly easy as I only need black, white and grey colors. I started with some basic line drawings with the intention of getting me going and finding a direction to go in. However, my drawings turned out a lot better than I had anticipated and they are visually strong on their own. I particularly like how the bends in the bandage appear slightly three dimensional regardless of it being a completely 2D drawing.

I originally planned to develop my drawings a lot more before I started designing prints from them. However during our group tutorial with Louise and also a Tutorial with Susan, they liked the drawings already and thought they were strong enough to be made into prints as they are. 

From this, I decided to layer and photocopy some of my drawings to see how they might look placed together.

Although I like the layered images I think the drawings might be better on their own or next to eachother rather than layered. When they are overlapped some of the quality of the drawing is lost and becomes a bit too much. However I do really like the two tones of grey together, which happened due to my drawings being on tracing paper. If I was to have these drawings as individual motifs placed together, they could work well being printed in different grey tones.

Unit X | Research and Artist Inspiration

After mind-mapping ideas and doing further research, we decided to use bandages, rope and drape of fabric used in martial arts uniform as a starting point. Bandages are regularly used in several martial arts to wrap around the wrists and ankles for support. Rope is used in a similar way in the underground, illegal side Muay Thai - a form of Thai kickboxing. I think that this is an interesting idea to develop into drawings.
Furthermore, James Long uses different yarns together in order to create their own fabrics, so making our own ropes from various materials could be a good direction to go in.
I began my visual research by taking photographs of loose and wrapped bandages.

During our tutorial with Tom, he said that they do not want us using digital print during this unit. My specialism is digital print so this obviously put me a little out of my comfort zone. Nevertheless I have experience of screen print and I know all of the processes. At first it was daunting but as I develop my ideas with the intention of being screen printed I am more excited to be going into the print room, especially to dye all of my own fabrics.

My group have made a joint Pinterest board so that we can easily share our ideas and show each other what we're pinning. Link is here. While researching I found various artists that caught my eye. They all have a parallel line drawn element to their work which I think would work really well with the bandage concept. These inspirations will also make it easy to keep with the black and white colour palette of our collection.

 

Print | Week 1

This week I started working in Print.

The first drawing task we were given was really interesting. We were put into groups and each group was given a sheet of vinyl that has been stuck to the wall. The vinyl was cut into tiny 1mm strips and we had to peel it off the wall and place it back on in a different way. We were given the word 'Unravel' to work around.

These are some of the drawings I made from what we created.

After this, we were then given the word 'rearrange' and were told to make another drawing using the same materials by moving them around. I really liked the outcome of this drawing day and I think my team worked really well in deciding what to do with the vinyl. I like the drawings I have created this week as they are different to anything I have drawn before.