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.