This project was fully completed at home due to a lockdown. This meant adapting to work with the resources that we had around the house.
One of the techniques that I found most effective was my fashion illustrations I created using a continuous line, tone, negative space and also two hands drawing simultaneously. These drawings are in my Fashion Illustrations – Method 3, Series 3 blog. I think that this technique is very effective and requires limited equipment. I used one HB pencil and a plain piece of A4 paper and it is so quick to create. For my 4 drawings I used the same photo for inspiration to see all the variations you could get. This is a very useful process if you were designing a garment where the most important feature is the silhouette it creates and whether is is impactful by itself without any further detail. You could use a negative space drawing to illustrate this. You could further develop this idea in a second drawing by using tone to highlight the areas of light and dark on the garment.
Another technique that I found particularly effective is when I created and sewed my own pattern magic designs. I wrote about how I created these in my Sewing my pattern pieces together that are inspired by the Pattern Magic designs blog. I thought that this is a very effective method to create 3-D shapes using fabric, I just created small samples and I can envision the extravagant garments you can create using these techniques.
One technique that I did not particularly enjoy was creating Technical Flats Fashion Drawing as they were quite tricky to do and I found them quite time consuming. However, with practice I can improve on this skill and therefore it will become a more enjoyable technique to do.
If I were to do this project again, I probably would have liked to experiment further with the pattern magic technique and improve the definition of the 3-D shapes by using interfacing to strengthen the fabric. This would create more obvious edges, as although I ironed creases in the fabric for all the edges before I sewed them, after I constructed the designs I was left with curved edges and it would be hard to re-iron creases in the fabric once it has been sewn.
I don’t think that there is anything that I would do differently but I think that I would improve and expand further on the techniques.
One artist that stood out to me was Kareem Iliya, I really liked his style of fashion illustration, which focuses on the silhouette of the garment. I think that his work is very impactful and creative. I also really enjoyed creating my own illustrations inspired by his particular style of work, which I wrote about in my blog called My fashion illustrations inspired by the work of Kareem Iliya. His style is inspiring me to further explore creating drawings focusing only silhouette.
I found completing a whole project at home in lockdown absolutely fine, I personally found that certain practicals took me slightly longer at home than we would have at college.
Overall, I think that this project went quite well and I have learnt many new techniques, which I hope to use and develop in the future.
I feel quite prepared for my final major project as over the last 3 projects I have been able to trail a wide variety of techniques some of which I have done previously at GCSE and others which I have learnt and trialed in these past projects. I think that I now have a good understanding of how I could apply and expand on these techniques in my future projects. I also now know how long certain techniques will take and can plan my time around this. The techniques that I have trialled, I have learnt a lot from what went well, what did not go so well and how I can improve. Now that I have this knowledge, in future projects I can reflect on what I did previously and potential problems that I can anticipate and therefore avoid.
Unpicking Fashion 