fashion project

After my previous work being based on pleating, I have chosen to continue this into my next project! I have asways enjoyed manipulating and structuring fabrics!



Due to having a few spare weeks I have chosen to set myself a short project in which to develop my ideas and skills further. This project could kick start research ideas and intial bases for my work in the new term. My intial ideas have come from architecture from around the city. I intend to explore the structures and lines of the buildings and transfer this ideas into garments.

Fashion Lecture

Freelance designer Susie Petrou teaches fashion and textile students at Brighton. Her lecture brought awareness of the importance of visual research and development processes. The main points which stayed in my mind were the importance to be aware of the ever changing fashion world, to get involved with as much as possible, to engage with many ideas, concepts and skills! Petrou has taken a Ba in Fashion, and two Ma'a one in Textiles and a second in Fine Art Photography. I have realised the importance knowing why I am doing my Ba Textiles course and to work out what I want to achieve from it, where will it lead me and what skills will I need, in order to achieve this!
Even though Petrou started out as a freelance designer, her skills and development of knowledge of fashion, textiles and photography, over the past years has allowed her to design knit wear, be part of the Next design team, to work to WGSN as a trend prediction researcher, as well as being a freelance photographer for small fashion companies and exhibiting her own photography work in serveral different galleries. I have seen that so much can be acheived if you have the passion and the drive to achieve.

Fashion illustration research

Presentation preparation

LO1: Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the key principles of, and context for your subject.
To further my development I also explored dying my own fabrics in different weights and manipulating them with my pleats. I feel the closer tighter pleats work well, however my drawign featured lines of verying distances appart, which I also created in my folds.

Paco Rabanne worked with folded paper begining in the 1960's. His work has inspired me to work with different weights of paper and to explore folding the paper in differernt ways. The paper holds well and remains in shape. I worked from my inital drawings from my sketchbook when manipulating the paper.
Development brought pleats into my work. I double clothed warp allowed me to create ribs and pleats of different sizes and my cad design on Illustration allowed me to play with how to apply pleats to my design design. I played with different pleat techniques at differnt angles and widths apart.



Tone, gradation, blurring, smudged, washed, blend, layers, over lapped, pastels, bolds,
lines, structure, grooves, curves, dashes, folds, dabs,

On Monday I have to do a presentation on my work as part of my assessment. I want to include the following points: Where my inital ideas came from, my development of these ideas, and how I represented my work into my chosen context.

Final Context

I am really pleased with the end result of my final context board as i feel they look professional and clearly state my intended context. I researched Chanel to be my main fashion House who could use my cloth, however I also found Prada and Louis Vutton to also use similar textured fabrics.



I chose these two fabric samples as I feel they acheived my aim for a pleated, textured fabric inspired by the lines, and a fabric to show gradarion of tonal colour.

Visual inspiration boards

My inspiration has come from a variety of different natural form, from shells to fox gloves flowers to button mushroom. Along the way I found artist to inspire my drawing techniques such as Monet to Turner to contemporary artists such as Sally Cummings and Emma Trimmnel. Later in my work I developed my work into manipulation and came across interior design as an influence, contrasting the natural form with man made influences!



Through out my work I was continuously inspired by colour, with an ever developing colour scheme. I began with pastel and when I turned digital I found excitement in colour swatches and Pantone colours! I ended up with two very different colour pallets, pastels and a purple colour scheme for my woven cloth and bright Strong colours ranging from pinks to royal blues to terracotta and browns. I do feel I could pull my colour scheme together in future for my work to work in harmoney.

Other work

I used digital drawing more than pen on paper drawings as these were quicker, easier to play with colour and tone. I could use a range of effects at the touch of a button, and do a number of ideas in the space of minutes that would normally take me an afternoon. However I feel my porfolio lacked tradational drawing and next time I will ensure I will make the time to produce these also!!






For my weave development I like to create hand woven test pieces using photocopies of my inital drawings. This helps me to see if the colour ways work, the density of the colour blocks and also different textures that I could apply to my cloth. I enjoy working in this medium because its quick and easy to arrange, photograph and then rearrange into another compotion. I will continue to use this through out my projects!

Initial woven samples

Woven fabrics to compliment digital prints

Digital Artwork Final designs

Digital Art Work

My development for my digital prints has been vast and I now need to select and focus on a selection of final designs.

For my development I have started to research fabric structures such as pleats and other forms of folding. So far I have come across Alexandra Verschueren, whose work I admire greatly.

Fabric design

This evening I have been developing skills on photoshop. Mostly I have been appling filters to my photographed images in order to pixulate and distort them in order to reflect my drawings. I have also created my own brush tools taken from sections of my digital artworks, as a means to create patterns and texture. I have begun to create an idea for my digital print designs, however I need to develop a concept and investigate placesments. To do this I have now been working with creating my own patterns using my photographs and rotating and cropping as well as playing with the opacity levels.

Before I continue to develop my work I need to work decied in the style of print I want to create.
So far I have looked at the work of Jonathan saunders, with his use of bold simple stripes as well as creating my own using my photographs to create strips of colour to manipulate.

Development

The past two weeks I have spent creating a double cloth warp in preparation to weave. I have learnt that more time and pacients is need to create such a cloth and I shall not be doing it again. If I could I would use my two warps separtately. I always try to push myself to do something a bit different, but in future I want to keep my ideas simple.

My drawing has developped well and I have had some interesting outcome, but I now need to push these further before I apply them to my cloth. After introducing a new techniques of drawing I have refreshed my drawing skills and provocted some interesting outcomes. I have also researched the liked of Monet and Turner as well as Pointilist for inspiration. I love the dashes and splodges used to build up the layers of colour. I love the way certain colours stand bold and how texture is created. I have enjoyed working with acrylic paint and gaouche due to the colours I can create and how layer upon layer can be added with out effecting the paper unlike watercolours.