First year uni work - Part 2

So I've managed to pry myself away from A Game Of Thrones by George R R Martin long enough to do this post. I started reading it last week and I cannot stop it's so good. I'm only about 10 chapters in and I'm already completely emotionally attached to the characters (well, the nice ones anyway). The only thing I dislike about Martin's writing is what he does to them. Poor Bran and Lady (If you've read the books you'll know what I mean). I actually sometimes have to stop reading for a bit because its rather upsetting. Silly, I know, but this is what Martin's brilliant writing and imagination is capable of doing to people. I also really want to watch the HBO series based on it, but unfortunately I know it's going to take me an age to finish the book as it's so big and I'm a slow reader, so I will have to wait.

Anyway, on to more of my uni work. Like I said last time, my final project was one where we chose a trend and researched it to give us inspiration and design ideas for the company we were designing for. Not actually and literally designing for them obviously, just hypothetically, so we could grasp the concept of working and designing with others mottos and ideals in mind, instead of just designing for ourselves with no limits. I chose Botannica Britannica for my trend as I thought it would be the best suited out of the four trends we were made to pick from, for my brand Ben Sherman. Designing with this company in mind gave me a chance to design menswear for the first time which made a nice change. I did find it more difficult and I did kind of like it, but I don't think it's really suited to me to be honest. Although maybe in the future I wouldn't mind trying to design for a proper high end menswear brand, as I would have more freedom, or a tailoring company as I adore suits and jackets (especially the good old classic Tweed, of which I own about three of myself).

So to get my designs best suited to the Sherman brand, I started out by drawing technical flats of the ranges of clothing he has, for example his classic pieces and his statement pieces.

Once I had done that I then used my floral ideas as colour references and prints and to keep from doing the normal floral shades and patterns, I decided to look at dying flowers to get the musty, cloudy tones which not only gave it a uniqueness but it also manned up the florals a bit to suit the customer profile.

The resulted fabrics chosen were ones with an antique and aged look about them and I then used them in an appropriate way to suit Ben Sherman. For instance, sometimes a whole print would be used for a pair of shorts or a shirt, or it would just be in the details like the binding or the cuff or the lining. I also zoomed into some classic Sherman pieces, such as their shirts and jackets, so I could really pick out the statement details.

Once I had my designs and fabrics finished I could start off on my trend book, which was to be produced digitally and then sent off and printed out into a professional looking book. Here a a few pages from it.

    

And then finally my illustrations, which were done in a similar manner to my previous project. As you may be able to tell, I can't draw mens faces as well as I can women's so do forgive that.

So basically, yeah, that was my final project for year 1 at Northbrook. Just got to get started on my summer project now, although I'm never in the mood for it. I just want to relax, read, write, do some craft things and play some more tennis; I finally managed to get to the courts a couple of times with the family before getting a cold, which soon turned into an absolute hacking cough and which still hasn't completely disappeared. Hrmph :(

So anywho, I shall leave you to your business and I hope you have a wonderful day. And thankyou for reading

:)

x

First year uni work part 1

So I'm back, after many months of pure hard work, sweat and tears. This first year at uni has been brilliant but exhausting and I was absolutely cream crackered after it had all finished. But I had no time to rest as I needed to get all my stuff packed up ready to move out of my Worthing lodgings and back home. Then, to top it all off, I only had a few days to get settled before I needed to be at Graduate Fashion Week to be a dresser for the Northbrook third years. Once all that was over with however, I was able to kick back, relax and start my summer holidays. So I've had approximately 3 weeks of doing next to nothing so I could recover from the constant work load we had and now I'm ready to have a productive summer of blogging, reading and getting on with my dollhouse project and uni summer work. I'm also hoping to get down to the tennis courts soon for a few good games with my family. Wimbledon has very much got me in the mood!

Anyway, so what have I been up to these past few months I hear you ask. Well among other things, I've been to graduate fashion week (as I stated earlier), had a bbq on the beach, went shopping more times than I can remember, bought myself an iPad (I'm a bit of a techno gadget geek), read and watched The Hunger Games, went to see The Avengers Assemble in IMAX (absolutely mind-blowing, both the experience and the film!), really getting into Shakespeare again due to the fantastic Hollow Crown series on BBC 2, grown my nails (I was a biter) so will be able to do nail varnish tutorials/reviews now, bought many new products which I will share with you in the weeks to come and I think that's just about it. I mean I've probably done a lot more but my memory is so awful I can't remember. I really need to start writing these things down so I can recall these events in the future. 

I won't go into detail about all these things now, but in these next couple of posts I am going to take you from the last time I posted through to the uni projects I completed.

After Italy and the flu I came back to an excruciatingly hard work load for the second part of the deconstruction project. I won't explain the definition term to its extent as it is very complicated and has so many meanings and aspects to it that even we couldn't understand it fully. But basically it is about deconstructing the binary opposites we had chosen for our subject, both theoretically and physically. I had chosen old and new for mine, so I did a lot of deconstructing the Tweed jacket and mixing it with the deconstructed urban hoodie jacket. For example, I could take the ribbed cuffs, the fabric and the top stitching of the hoodie and combine it with the collar, tailoring and pockets of the tweed. This was such a complicated project because the more we looked into it, the more bewildering it became. The lectures and briefings throughout did help, but within a week it was all lost because we'd hit another wall with it. It was such a frustrating project and I'm glad it's over (It was a bloody long project too!) but I have to admit that I learnt a lot from it, which is the most important thing really.

I think I really found myself in illustration as well, because I discovered a technique which I love and I think it really expresses how I like my work to be precise, straightforward, neat and graphic. To get this final effect I used Photoshop to combine my scanned fabrics with my line drawings of the figures and clothes. This is definitely my preferred style of working because I love working with computers, but the downside is that it was very time consuming. Each illustration would take a whole evening to complete and that's without the technical flat drawings and final composition of fabrics, text and background.

Here are a few examples of my final illustrations:

                   



Unfortunately, as I've moved back home for the summer (if we can call this ghastly weather here in England summery!) all my college things are packed away, so I can't show any sketchbook work. However I hope these illustrations will do nicely and briefly explain my take on the project.

I will post again in the next few days about my next and last project of the year, where I designed as if I were designing for Ben Sherman with a floral trend in mind.

I hope everyone is having a lovely summer and I will see you all again in the next couple of days

:)
X