The last two weeks have been super busy for me, hence the lack of posts! My deadline for my final studio project of my second year, City Lights, was yesterday so I had a lot to finish and organise in time for this. But now that it's done I can share what has happened in terms of my work recently.
In my last post I talked a lot about screen printing and different dyes, but since then my project took a different turn and I moved away from these techniques and chose to focus on my digital work. My reason for doing this was that the prints I was creating felt like a step back from the sophistication of my digital designs, lacking the depth of the original scanned in collages. I realised I could not successfully recreate my work in a hand printed form, and that I would be better off spending more time developing my work in a digital form. So for the last two weeks this is what I've been doing, spending hours sat in front of a computer screen, which my eyes hate me for! However I feel this was a lot better suited to this project, and I'm quite happy with the outcome, which is a series of repeated patterns along with some visualisations of the contexts they could be used in.
The repeated patterns were created in Photoshop, as were the visualisations. I've always enjoyed digital work, so this was quite fun for me, although sometimes frustrating when the patterns wouldn't line up properly, or when the colours on the print outs differed from the screen. However I overcame these problems, and I feel I've improved my Photoshop skills quite significantly, which will be very helpful for third year. I printed out four of these repeating patterns onto A2 paper for my final outcome for this project, as well as some single designs onto A2 and some smaller groups of 9, to try and show how my designs work in many different scales and compositions. I also created an A5 booklet containing my visualisations of my designs being used in fashion and interior contexts. Some of these designs and visualisations can be seen below:
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| My favourite repeated pattern design |
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| A page from my booklet featuring my designs as a wallpaper in a bedroom setting |
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| Designs for backpacks |
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| Another page from the booklet, exploring scale and placement |
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| One of my compositions of 9 designs |
I also created a logo for this project to bring my work together and to get me thinking about how I want to present myself and my work in third year.
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| Logo for this project; also used on the cover of my booklet |
As this project
progressed I realised that the focus for my work is moving away from the methods of printing
textiles by hand and towards digital, but still with a strong focus on my own
drawings, experimenting with colour and composition. For me exploring fabrics through screen print and embroidery is still interesting, but it is no longer the area I feel fully engaged in. Likewise fashion does heavily inspire my work but I don't want to be making the garments myself. I feel that I am better suited to digital and drawing techniques, and I enjoy the challenges I face in these areas much more than in textiles. I already feel like I have much more focus and direction for my third year now; here's to hoping I feel the same when it starts!
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| My set up in the studio, which included my own photos, collages, experimentations with fabric and stencils, as well as my final outcomes. |
