Magic, Rights and Rituals

Magic, Rights and Rituals is the theme given for my pathway project. I have chosen Fashion and Textiles as my pathway stage and I have used M.C. Escher's work as inspiration for this project. This is my first time at making a sketchbook and I am finding it very difficult, I have not quite grasped it's concept and therefore I have began making it a little late into the project.

I have chosen the Sphere Spirals composition, which gives a 3Dimensional illusion. By taking its basic structure.

I have developed it by repeating the pattern and adding symmetry to make my own illusion.

I have then used these patterns to make fashion illustrations, which have been further developed by continuously developing the illusionary pattern.

First I made a pattern for the bottom half of the dress.

I found it's construction quite challenging as I have no experience in pattern cutting or stitching, but still feel I managed to do an okay job. My end product is a poncho styled top, which originally began as a dress I had designed, but as I was sewing the fabric together on the over-locker, and continuously checking it's structure on the mannequin I ended up developing it even more.

I then photographed my garment on my friend. 
Fashion photographs.

yayoi kusama

Going to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern has taught me, if anything, is how far you can take a simple pattern and utilise it in infinite ways, each of which being completely different to one another. My favourite was the infinite mirror room and the infinite nets-no 2.

 No.2

 Infinite Mirror

Yayoi Kusama..

Another repetitive composition I like.

Exploratory Stage

PRINTING

For our exploratory stage we are starting off with printing; lino printing. we have been given the theme lines and points and using this theme I have tried out a few designs.

 I have chosen the design below and then carved it on a lino.

I started off by practising the process by only using the colour black and made simple mono-prints of the design. Once I had grasped the technique I began experimenting with colour and altering the direction to make further patterns with one lino.

We then tried another printing technique; colograph. For this technique I had to make a design on a piece of thick paper. Then the paper was polished and ink was put on it after which it was put through a presser.

This is the my final result

The last printing technique I learned was the dry point. Here I had to carve a design on some tin and again place it through the presser. My design was a combination of the patterns I saw on the building of the V&A and a picture I had taken during winter of a fence with frosted webs. I first sketched out my design:

and then produced the following result:

Out of all these printing techniques, lino was my favourite and I think that dry point is particularly good for  a finer result. Colograph on the other hand was extremely tiring and it needs a huge amount of energy to be able to pass it through the presser.

3D MODELLING

Our next stage in our exploratory stage was 3D modelling. We first began:making paper models still sticking to the lines and points theme:

These are some other sample models I made:

This one I made use net wire, I rolled it up, closed the ends and wrapped it with some colourful thread..

I cut out circles on plain white paper and used the left over cuttings to join them together in a pattern along a thin wooden stick to make this particular model:

 The one below is made of plaster alone.

Then we used plaster and wood to make models, again using the theme 'lines and points'. I chose shapes as they are quite prominently made of lines and have points!.I produced three models, the first was made of two shapes, squares and triangles placed on a long stick: 

Result:

the second was a doll wearing a circular top and skirt:

 and the last was a crown:

 I also experimented a little by trying to make a mosaic pattern wood on wood:

I found this particularly hard as the plaster wasn't enough to keep the small pieces to stick due 

to the nature of this particular wood and because it was so delicate that it kept chipping.

Although this whole process was rather difficult and I didn't enjoy it much after some time, I think I managed to produce a good outcome.

FASHION TEXTILES

I was really excited when it came to learning fashion textiles as I want to become a fashion designer. In our exploratory stage we learned techniques such as heat transfer printing, sun-printing, shibori, embroidery and felt making. Here is some of my heat transfer printing and embroidery work:

 GRAPHIC DESIGN


For this we were meant to make a comic book. I made one about my time spent at college.