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.  

Intentions | Direction

One of the main criteria of this unit is to think about your work, its purpose and audience. I am really interested in printing for fashion, I know that almost for sure. However I have never thought about whether I want to go in the direction of high end fashion or high street.

I have thought about it a lot in the last few days and I came to my own conclusion. I thought about how I would feel seeing my work on a catwalk, and as proud and incredible that would be I realised I would get more of a buzz from seeing a regular person wearing my prints in the street. Obviously this makes me want to design for high street fashion, for example retailers like Topshop, H&M and Urban Outfitters. I've realised the 'dream' is to have my designs available to the average person like myself, and to remain affordable.

I did some research on high street clothing and their materials. I found that high street clothing is largely made up of polyester and cotton. The fabrics used on the high street need to be cheap, fast and easily accessible. Due to this I had my first set of digital prints done on a Cotton Voile. I also had a set of prints done on Crepe de Chine, which is a silk that is a little more expensive. I chose this because the example fabric showed that the colours come out vibrant and opaque, whereas the cotton provides more of a translucent print. It will be interesting to see how the two fabrics produce the same print designs.

I also took a look at WGSN to see what kind of fabrics are set to be used in upcoming trends. I found that a lot of S/S15 predictions make use of sheer fabrics along with opaques. I like this trend and it is totally adaptable to high street fashion. I like the idea of an opaque dress with sheer sleeves or sheer sectioning…