Week 11

Day One

Today was the beginning of our two week individual project. The project that I had opted for was the three words project, I was looking forward to starting this as it seemed really interesting. Today consisted of attending two exhibitions the first was the 'Only In England' this included photographs from Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. I really enjoyed looking at these photographs as I felt that they had a clear and strong sense of occasion and celebration as each photograph was interesting to look at as I felt that it represented a story. The second exhibition was of Sarah Lucas's work. This collection of work was very different to the previous exhibition. I found Lucas's work interesting as I felt that it tried to objectify men as well as women, in a variety of different medias and methods.

I found today interesting although I think that if I spent a bit more time looking at the exhibitions I would have been able to deduct a stronger meaning from the pieces.

Day Two

I started off today by choosing my three words, I found this very difficult as I kept changing my mind. I kept switching from using Tim Walker or Jack the Ripper, in the end I decided to base my project around Jack the Ripper as I felt that I could look into many different aspects, I also found the story very interesting which I wanted to overall portray into my designing. My other two words were conceal and mismatch.

The first thing I did after selecting my three words was to create a mind map, this allowed me to discover ideas that related to my three words. Once completing this I had I began to create my concept board, I struggled with this a lot as we were not able to use the internet so I used the resources iin the librabry however found that there was a lack of resources that related to the subject I wanted to explore. I gathered a variety of images some from books and then others from television programmes and films, I looked at 'Ripper Street' and 'Plunkett and MacLean'. I also read up on stories of Dick Turpin the highway man. I wanted to research into the highwayman route as although different to Jack the Ripper I felt there were some similar attributes, such as they were both criminals from the same era, I also noticed the way that highwaymen hid themselves with capes, hats and masks and I found this interesting as it related to my second word, Conceal.

AS i had collected imagery for my Jack the Ripper and Conceal words I needed to find images that represented mismatch. This lead me to looking into angels as the opposite to Jack the Ripper and Criminals would be angels. I found a book that included many different images of angels which I used in my concept board along with my other images.

Day Three

Today consisted of completing two workshops the first was working on the stand. I really enjoyed this as I was able to represent my three words through fabrics and shaping them on the body. I felt that I came up with some interesting ideas that I will develop further. Although some things that I would have liked to have done better would to have worked less around the neck area and focus on other areas of the stand and also to have focussed on manipulating the fabric a bit more to come of with a variety of different shapes and techniques.

The second part of the day was drawing our three words. This included a series of different exercises. At the beginning I struggled quite a lot in trying to represent my words through drawing, however once I had started to think less and focus on what those words made me feel I was able to represent my words in different ways with different medias. However I think that with the drawings I created I would've liked to use them in my research and development but I feel that they are not strong enough to use, therefore if I did it again I'd like to think more of the emotions these words presented rather than the literal meaning of them.

Week 10

Day One

Today I started creating my prints as I had scanned in my drawings, however before I could start designing them we had another group meeting to see the groups progress over the weekend. Everybody appeared to be on track for our group presentation later this week. However I had heard that the colour scheme had been changed, our original one was supposed to be Grey, black, Red and Lavender. This had been changed to Black, Red, Lavender, Pink and Light Blue. In our group meeting I bought this up as an issues because I believed that the additional pink and blue would make our collections appear to be more spring summer, as well as this these colours did not go without theme. After pointing this out to the group we changed back to our original colour scheme, Luckily this did not affect anyone's work dramatically and we were able to move on with our work successfully.

After that I carried on with creating my prints whilst checking in with the group so we could discuss the prints that would work best with the designers creations.

 

Day Two

As I had created some prints yesterday I started to edit them and add them to the designers eight designs. I found this to be time consuming although worth it as I was deciding which points work best as well as the scale of them and where they should be placed on the body. This meant a lot of trial and era coming up with the right prints for the garments as well as showing the designers which prints I thought would look best with their designs.

Towards the end of the day I had placed my prints onto 16 designs, I was pleased with how most of them looked however with trying to meet the demands of the designers it was difficult as the prints I created did not always go with the designs. This meant changing them and rearranging them in order to make the designs look as a collection.

Day Three

Today was the last day of our group project which meant that we were to present our work to the tutors and the group. After watching the other groups I felt that my group could've worked better together as towards the end of the project tension started to build up and it was difficult to present our work successfully.

After looking at the past two weeks if I were to do it again I think that I would put myself forward to have been a leader, as this is what our group lacked. We needed a leader that would've made quick and decisive decisions, which would've helped to push our ideas forward as although I was pleased with my prints I felt that due to a lack of clear direction from myself and the group everyone's individual work did not work fluidly with each others.

Week 9

Day One

Today was the first day of the two week project. The brief was to create an A/W collection for next February. My group was given the task of designing for the Comme Des Garcons label. In this each memeber was given a seperate task that they needed to complete. The group consisted of; three designers, two print designers, two accessory designers and two promotion. My task was to design the prints for the three collection alongside another member.

So on the first day of our group project we started off by having a group discussion deciding on which direction we would like to take the project in. Previous to this we had been given two quotes, we selected the second one which was: 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.'.

Firstly the designers split this quote up into three and decided they would use that as a starting point of development, I however used the whole quote as a reference as I believed that my prints would be able to connect the three different collections together. So as my independent initial research I looked into the meaning of the quote discovered that its meaning was about communism and used that as a starting point. I that that this would be an interesting starting point for the project as I would be able to create bold prints that would represent the meaning.

Day Two

Today started with the group having a meeting in the morning discussing the areas that we would be researching. I started looking into communist iconography and I started to create some initial prints. For this I used an image of some dead flowers with drips falling from them, I placed this onto a garment in Photoshop to see what it would look like. I felt that the print was interesting however lacked as the colours were clashing and were not the colours from the groups chosen colour scheme. Although overall looking at them I felt that they were an interesting starting point as they  had inspired me and pushed me to come up with some more interesting ideas.

 

Later this evening as some of the images on our concept board were of dripping ink and images that representing melting and floating, I started dipping the nib of a paint brush into black in and then into water, this allowed me to see how the ink floated delicately in the water whilst mixing into the water, I took images and a video as I thought this would inspire me.

Day Three

After creating three prints yesterday that I found unsatisfactory I researched more into the groups designer, I looked at previous collections, noticing their use of print and colour. I found that they used a lot of large bold prints as well as prints overlapping each other. I wanted to create some prints that I thought would be similar to this Comme Des Garcons style but also included my individual style.

I looked at my communist research and took some popular shapes and symbols and see how I could represent them differently. For this I drew out the Hammer and Sickle as I knew this was a popular symbol that represented communism. I also used the dripping of ink affect as this related to my previous researche and the quote, I used the inky effect in my communist drawings and I also included it in the drawings of dying flowers because this related to the quote as well as to the fact that the collections were for A/W. These drawings were a good starting point for me as I was able to develop them over my SDS days, ready for when I returned back to the group.