Gloucestershire University

I have been offered an unconditional place at Gloucestershire University to study fashion design. This  is my first choice in university and I am hoping to be moving up there in September 2016. This is such a wonderful opportunity for me and I am hoping to fully embrace all of the opportunity that it could throw my way.

Flight

After coming back from the christmas break, we have started term two with a project based around flight. This project is very open and we can base it around our own interpretation of the word flight.

I wanted to avoid the obvious themes of flight such as birds, planes and feathers. Instead I am basing my project around 1900's transport such as hit air balloons, trains, cars, bikes, horse and carriages. I came to thinking of wanting to do this from the film 'The Great and Powerful Oz', in the very beginning scenes of the film when they are in Kansas, the setting is a circus. What made me think of this was the tornado which carried oz to Munchkin land, their flight in the tornado, however, I am going to be taking inspiration from the era and the hit air balloon which carried oz into the Munchkin land.

I do feel as if I will really enjoy this project, I can see a lot of potential designs and pathways that I could take this project with.

Fashion and Surface Design -

We have been given architecture to focus on for our fashion and surface design project. As soon as I found out what our project brief was, I immediately went onto Pintrest to search for garments and inspiration for this project. When I was on Pintrest I came across this page which purely shows white architectural objects and buildings. The pure colour scheme and the plain, yet intriguing look interested me. From there, I decided to look for pastel and white architecture, which is when I came across Russell house in Covent gardens in London.

While i was drawing up my sketches and ideas, i realised that i was going more towards fashion rather than surface design, which then lead me to do fashion illustrations of dresses and light flowing garments, which were all in pastel colours. However, i found that in most of my research the buildings and architectural objects had all had straight, flat edges, so I decided to try and incorporate this into the floaty garments.

I have also decided that I am going to be using a screen print technique in my final garment. In order to get the clean cut edges of the skyline and buildings that I wanted, screen printing would be the safest option. I can then paint over the screen print over the screen print by hand once it is dried to finish the final look of the garment.

Photomedia

I have now all finished my photomedia project! I did really enjoy this project and I feel as if my work has already improved from the first project that we did. I used photoshop to manipulate photographs that I had taken in the studio, cutting away the faces of the subjects in the photographs and replacing them with scenic images. I do feel as if this really portrayed my idea of rapprochement as it shows the harmonious relations between people and nature. Also by cutting away the faces of the subjects in the photograph, it gives them no identity, a clean slate, it makes them new.

Photomedia - Rapprochement

This week we were given new projects, for this particular one in photo media, we were given a dictionary  in which we had to pick a word at random to base our project around. My word was 'Rapprochement'! As I didn't know much about this word my first step was to find the definition, which happened to be 'an establishment or resumption of harmonious relations'. My initial thoughts when I first read this were identities and relationships. It was about people, countries, things coming together and being combined to one.

Within this project I would like to really portray rapprochement through people and their identities, making them into something new.

Week Three

Week 2 - Experimentation

This week I have been experimenting with many different materials and surfaces, which could be used to place my images on.

I went into a graphic design warehouse called Teklagraph to use their exposure and dark room to print onto metals. I used my film roll to expose the image onto the light sensitive metal. This worked extremely well and made me wonder about what else I could do with the photographs that I had taken. I could experiment with the laser cutter with my images on many different materials such as fruit, wood, fabric, metal and other materials. I could also print my photographs onto the different surfaces or stickers.

I now have a rough idea of whatI would like to do for my final pieces within this project, I would like to use one of my photographs and cut through it to create holes in the paper, this is so when I hold it up to the light you can see the light and background come through the image in the shape of what the image itself is. I had experimented with this when we went to uphill and Sandbay to sketch. This was one of my favourite techniques that I had experimented with as the end effect was astonishingly beautiful. However, when I first did this technique, I used paper, however when I held it up to the light, the paper flopped and folded, so the next time I do this, I would like to use metal to make it sturdier.

My sketch book is also coming along well, as I've been doing a lot of artists research and annotation of my images and experiments.