Easter Holidays Week One

I think that this week I have done more then I usually do at college. I have got lodes done, and probably confused myself more with different ideas. I started the week off by entering the Northern Design Competition. There are different categories and winners are chosen from each and then overall. It sounded really good and my work that I already have could be submitted so I decided to enter. To enter you had to send four sheets and a written explanation of the project. I used Photoshop to make the sheets. It was quite hard to decide what to put on them as I have got so much work with carrying on the project. I have got years worth of work to put in four sheets. I broke it down into four sections. Research, samples, development and outcome. I am going to print the sheets off for my portfolio as I think that it will be good to show at my other interviews that I have entered a competition and did some extra work to send. It took a long time to sort the sheets out and get them looking right. Because I haven’t made the final garment I had to do some mock ups of them. I had some images of Sarah from an old project where she is wearing one of my old garments, so I used these and photoshopd my new ideas onto them. They worked well seen, as I haven’t actually finished any designs yet! So these can also be used in my portfolio and be used for my project. Because the sheets worked well I did some more which are just simple mood/colour boards, which I can use within my folio or sketchbook.

For a lot of my work I have been using shapes which are out of my photographs of my wire samples. I have photoshopd them and mixed them together to create more shapes out of what I had. I have drew the original samples and done a couple of paintings. So I decided I needed to draw the new shapes as these have been developed more. So I did a few line drawings. Nothing fancy. I tried to look at them more and think about the figure and think about how they could be used for a garment. I scanned these into photoshop and played around with them on the images of the mannequin which I have been using. I played around with scale, and mixed them together, rotated and flipped them to create some garment shapes. I am really pleased with them and they look sculptural and modern. They could be made into some gorgeous unique dresses, something that you would see on the couture catwalks. The only thing is, imp not sure I would be able to make them or even have the time. They would need to be made from stiffened fabrics. I have done this before and it is hard to get the fabric as hard as what would be needed to make these kinds of garments. If I used wire mesh or card in between the fabric layers, I don’t know how I would sew it together. Something i'll have to think about!

I wanted to use illustrator because I no that a lot of courses that are fashion expect you to know how to do it. Which means industry will want you to know as well. I wanted to do some technical drawings to go in my portfolio to take to the Salford interview that I have in may, I remember seeing a lot of their students having them in their portfolios at graduate fashion week. I had a go of it not having a clue how it works and I think I did quite well. I have done a few simple line drawings of some of the dresses off the mannequin that I did using Photoshop. I have ordered two books which explain illustrator and how to do technical drawings so when these get delivered they will help me to do some more.

Over the next two weeks while im off for the Easter holidays I want to make some more samples with the wire mesh which I ordered, and photograph them. I need to make sure I develop them from the last ones. I also want to get some more sheets done ready for any interviews. I want to include the technical drawings and designs, and I also want to do some stitching into photographs. I have got a lot which I haven’t got anything to do with, so I am going to machine stitch into them to make them a bit different and more interesting. I am really pleased with how much work I have got done over the last few weeks, and my skills on Photoshop and illustrator have defiantly improved. I didn’t want to make a dress for the exhibition due to using difficult materials. I didn’t think I had the skills to make a metal dress. But now that I have done some designs I can imagine them made with black fabric. I would like to make one, but im not sure how. I don’t want to spend a lot of time making one and not getting anything else finished for the show, and then it ending up not being very good due to it being to technical. I have seen some on the catwalk with are similar, Dior and Hussein Chalayan have used stiffened shapes, but they have a lot of time, money and skill to develop the garments, I have got a few weeks and no help. I will have to do some research and see what I can come up with.