Youth Fix Post One

23^rd Jan- 30^th Jan

For my last quick project of the practice unit I have decided to do another live brief which will be entered into Bradford’s Textile Society Competition for the ‘Printed fashion Textiles design on any base fabric’ category.

As it is nearing the end of the Practice Unit, I want to try something different, whether that be a different context, printing technique or software. Therefore, my ideas have narrowed down to a Unisex Children’s wear colourful, vibrant digital print collection for Spring/Summer 18 with the age range of 0 -12 yrs. Therefore, I can practice a new context as well as experiment with bold colours and the use of Adobe Illustrator to refresh my skills.

This week has been mainly focused on gathering research and primary drawings. As children’s wear is a new context I have approached, research into it has been my main priority. WGSN provides new trends for all ages and I came across a trend forecast called ‘Youth Tonic’ that stood out to me. The initial image is what has inspired the rest of my research, with its fun, childlike doodles and colours seen in figure 19.

Fig. 19

With fun, bright bold qualities and naïve themes as a starting point I then turned to the upper scale high street brands such as ‘Monkey Mccoy and ‘Melula’ to explore the kind of styles and trends going on today. Bright colour was a reoccurring theme as well as dynamic, energetic shapes and prints and therefore I feel colour and shape will be an important part within my collection. Artists, Tom Abbiss Smith, Artelier Bingo, Ashley Goldburg and fashion designer Daniel Palillo inspired me to take a mark making combined with simple graphic shapes approach to drawing which has also allowed me to work both with hand mark making as well as digital drawing techniques to gather drawings I can combine to create unique patterns.

Fig. 20

Mark Making is an easy and efficient way to achieve quirky and original marks. It is a technique that always works and is something I enjoy. Using household objects and black acrylic paint, I started to create exciting marks and shapes inspired by the child like doodles seen on the WGSN page. The childlike naïve theme has been communicated through these, yet they can still work appropriately on a printed children’s wear garment.

Fig. 21

Mark making

The marks are simple yet effective however, my plan is to combine these mark making prints with more graphical shapes made on illustrator so I can start to add bright bold colour which is essential for my children’s wear collection. 

Botanical Untouched Post Two

17^th Jan- 23^rd Jan

As I have learnt from my last project that preparation for the Print room is key, a lot of my time this week has been spent preparing and mono printing. Figure 12 shows my prepared repeat patterns done on Photoshop as guides for my painting on to screen as to minimalise mistakes and make the most of the time I have in the Print room.

Fig. 12

Repeat Guides

Colour is a really important to get right and therefore, I have spent a lot of time mixing colours, recording the outcomes and printing some colour tests onto the fabrics I am hoping to use. This colour experimentation was really valuable as I learnt a lot about reactive dyes and what fabrics they work on the best which informed my printing.

Although I have not applied the technique of mono printing within my time at university a lot, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed doing it. There is a lot of room for mistakes when painting on the screen as you can just wash away the colour and paint over it. Although it was time consuming, the outcomes are really effective and convey a quality on the fabric similar to that of watercolour and have a certain authenticity to them. One sample shows the autumn/winter collection, whereas the two other samples show a more spring/summer collection.

In order to support the mono prints within a collection, sublimation prints were made with my other repeat patters on Photoshop. This also meant that the prints were made up from my original drawings which still enabled the watercolour qualities to transfer onto the fabrics. A back up technique such as digitally printing or sublimation printing is something I always think about. When my Autumn/Winter mono print design was pushed through the screen to transfer to fabric, residue from a previous printer was left on the screen, blocking parts of the mesh. Therefore areas of my print could not reach onto the fabric. However, due to having the digital back up plan I was able to quickly print digital and sublimation samples to back up and support the Autumn/Winter collection.

Fig. 13

Mono Print mistake

  Visualisations of the two different collections were made in order to understand how each individual print could work as a bedding set, whether it would work for the main duvet, the reverse of the duvet, the pillow cases or the bed sheet as the same motifs and repeat patterns can be used throughout a single bedding set seen in figure 14.

Fig. 14

Bed sets

As I need to move on to my final project of the unit I do not have time to thoroughly think more into other bedroom furniture. However, making up visualisations can give me a rough idea on how my prints could work at different scales for lamps shades, chairs, cushions and wallpaper. This is something I can really start to think about in Unit X which could also inform the making up of a product for the degree show.

Fig. 15

Examples of furnishings

Although I have produced a small collection for bedding, there is a lot more mileage I can attain from my practice throughout this Unit and apply it to future projects in Unit X such as screen printing techniques, context research and painting skills. The thought of painting was a nerve racking one until it worked well in this Unit. Therefore, hopefully I can start to explore painting with different mediums more thoroughly in the next units/projects to create more print collections.

Fig. 16

Botanical Untouched Post One

9^th-16^th January

To start my second self-initiated brief off I have been looking at photographs I took whilst on a trip to Amsterdam. Whilst there I visited the Keukenhof tulip fields where there were various types of flowers and plants to capture. (fig. 9)

Fig. 9

Amsterdam Keukenhof 

Using watercolour, I have been painting from the colour, shapes and textures I can see within the photographs. Initially my painting started off a bit rough and messy as watercolour is not something I have practiced much, however I have persevered and started to create my own style and collection of paintings. The paintings have a unique quality to them as they are still not fully controlled and perfect, yet have gained a certain character and delicacy as seen in fig.10.

Fig. 10

Watercolour painting

As my context is furnishing fabrics, I have been looking for inspiration from liberty London’s (see fig.11) print collection for furnishing fabrics and have found many that relate to the theme of florals similar to my work. Comparable to the Liberty London collections, my water colour paintings are very feminine which is ideal for a bedroom wear context as my designs will attract a female audience with the idea to dress both individual and shared bedrooms in many different households. This could also mean designing for bedrooms for couples as females are most likely to take over the interior aspect of their bedrooms, adding softer more dainty furnishings.

Fig. 10

Liberty London furnishing fabrics

As my drawings consist of various smaller motifs, I am planning to scan and photocopy them in order to manipulate scale and create some interesting compositions. These compositions will be the basis of my prints, which I will be taking to Photoshop to create repeat patterns. I also expect some of the repeat patterns to be a guide for my mono prints. Although I have not practiced mono printing techniques recently, I believe it is the right approach to allow the kind of characteristics I have built within my watercolour drawings and paintings to communicate through on to fabric. I expect the mono printing technique will be time consuming and so I plan to produce different prints using my Photoshop developments in order to bulk up my collection when digitally printed.