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.