Projection and Garment Research

As I have been very stuck with my designing this Unit, I decided to do some projection onto stand work. This process has really helped me in the past and I felt that it would benefit me this time too.

Rather than aim for actual garments I decided to just create as much drape as I could, so that I could see what draping might do to my prints.

Even though the stand work I did wouldn't be practical for a high street garment, I believe I can still take inspiration from them in order to draw up some more realistic ideas.

I used my projection photographs to play around with illustrations and placement on the body and

I realized I need to look at length, as well as researching what garments I actually want to design. 

Although I roughly dragged and dropped these images, I think they have helped me to decide what kind of shapes I want. I plan on looking further into this and also using these images to help develop my print designs. As I want to make a high street collection I need to make the garments more wearable.



Unit X | Group Presentation

This week we have been working on the group collection for the presentation to Tom from James Long.

Although we have been going into the studio and working around each other while we talk through ideas, we have been working on our own collections, just keeping links between them. Our drawing styles really vary so we worked together to create 12 final garments that incorporate everyone's designs.

We all sat and decided on what outfits we were going to create before drawing them out. This really helped us to not throw garments together for the sake of it, and we thought a lot about placement, colour and texture. Elle and I drew the garment shapes, then each of us filled in the area which was taken from our designs. This worked really well for us as our drawing styles came together successfully without the job being left to one person. I am proud of our final line up and I think we worked really well as a team.

Unit X | Starting to Design

This week we started to take our ideas and turn them into actual designs. Me and Pipp are used to just sampling fabrics and materials, so this is another step further for us. I have previously experimented with placing prints onto very plain and basic garments however I haven't yet designed my own in such detail.

I really enjoyed designing different outfits. I started by drawing templates in order to put in different prints in different places and experiment with placement and tones. During our tutorial with Louise, she told us about range plans and showed us Prada 14 as an example. The collection followed a certain set of trends or elements and injected them into various different garments. For example, they repeatedly used large faces on their designs, imitations of bra shapes on the chest and sports trims. 

I tried to keep this in mind when creating my own designs. I wanted to keep our concept of martial arts in mind at the same time, so I decided to repeat these elements; cross over v-neck, cinching at the waist, culottes, various fabrics wrapped around the body and sheer fabrics. I chose each of these based on martial arts uniforms such as karate jackets and kickboxing shorts.

Unit X | Fashion Collage and Muse

We've had several workshops since Easter with Sarah, which have been focused on fashion illustrations and collages. The first thing we had to do was pick a muse to aim towards and take inspiration. The muse we chose is the lead character of the film 'Stick It'. She is a boyish personality with a lot of attitude and opinion, but also has feminine features and is pretty. This is the mix that we have been trying to achieve in our collection. 

I started by sketching different images of her facial expressions to work and collage from.

 The next step was to collage together some illustrations, trying to locate where different textures might be on a garment or what different pieces might be made of. I particularly tried to work on print placement and scale, using the photographs from the projector work really helped with shape too. I think these went quite successfully considering I've never done them before and felt a bit lost to start with. I realized the trick was to not think about it too much.

Locating | Final Collections

This week I made the finishing touches to both my high end and high street collections.

I'm really happy with how they both turned out. My main fear was that the garments wouldn't be appropriate for the audience intended, as in the Intentions unit I aimed my collection at high street and although it was still high street in the end, the collection was more suited to high end high street, which was technically a different consumer.
Overall I am happy with the final garments and the prints themselves. This week I will be attending to finishing touches such as presentation of samples, consumer boards and finalising my submission for the Bradford Textiles project.

 

 As my final collections are finished I had to choose fabrics for each print to be printed on. This process is very limited for me as I don't have the budget to buy my own fabric rolls, which means I have to use the ones available to me in the studio. I have experienced these fabrics from the previous unit so I already have knowledge of which ones will or won't work for this units prints.

Luckily, most of the fabrics weren't too different to what I imagined the garment to be in which was a plus. After choosing the most suitable fabrics for each print, I had three different materials being printed on; Habotai, Cotton Optic and Cotton Satin. I am really looking forward to seeing how these turn out this week.

 The only major change I would have liked would be the sweatshirt and tshirt in the high street collection, I would have preferred those to be in a more stretchy Jersey material.

Locating | Fashion Illustrations

Part of my self initiated brief for this Unit stated that I wanted to develop my fashion illustrations and make them more outgoing and playful. Because of the colourful and lively nature of my prints I feel like this is the perfect opportunity to create crazy illustrations to go with them.

I began with photographs of my friend's faces and altered them in an app to give perfect complexion and increase the size of their eyes, overall making them look strange. I found an artist on Pinterest called Niky Roehreke, who's collage work inspired me to collage peculiar hair onto my faces using marbling photocopies. I loved the results because of how ridiculous they look.

After showing these in my weekly tutorial it was suggested that I also add block colour features like eyebrows and lips to make them even more bizarre. At first when I did this I wasn't sure if I liked them or not because they really were strange, however I have definitely warmed to them and think they go perfectly with my print designs. They are particularly suitable for my high-end print collection.

I then experimented with poses to see if they looked better. However, with the addition of the heads the weirder seemed a little but too much and looked way over the top. Because of this I decided to go back to the original basic standing position with arms by the sides. I feel like this works better because it doesn't take attention away from the faces and also shows the garment well.

 There is a more cartoony-like feel to my illustrations this time, which definitely goes well with the print collection as it is very colourful and reminiscent of pop art.