Lines of Enquiry- Colour and Design

After our colour palate not working very well I thought that we should change it to something that would be more suitable for printing. When I discussed this with the group they agreed and we decided to use brighter more acidic and childlike colours. This is our colour board which shows our final colour pallete.

After finalising our colour palette we started to source fabrics that we could use to print on in the print room based on the colours and what would work well with our designs. These are some of the designs that we created ready for the print room. 

We still haven't decided on what we wanted to create as a final garment although we all had a few different ideas. This made it difficult to find something that pleased every group member. initially we engineered our prints so that it would fit as panels in an A-line dress shape. As we started printing we realised this wasn't the direction we wanted to go in.

Lines of Enquiry- Print Room

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the session in which my group picked a colour pallete, which meant they had to make the decision without me. They chose soft pastel colours, which I initially liked and thought that they would bring a softer side to the theme in which we had chosen. Although having worked in the print room before using a pastel colour pallete I knew that it was going to be quite difficult to achieve the colours that we wanted because they were simply to pale. The first time we worked in the print room we worked with the hand painted reactive dyes which was a good experiment and showed us how difficult it was to create the pastel colours because when the fabric gets steamed the colours become even lighter.

This is our sample from the first print room session showing the outcome of our fabric. I was very disappointed with this as none of the colours came out because they were to pale. Unfortunately we will not be able to use this piece of fabric in our final garments, which we were hoping we would be able to due to the little time we have and the high demand for the print room. I think that our main problem we will have throughout the project will be a lack of time.

Lines of Enquiry- SWOT Analysis

In Tuesday’s session as a group we laid out all of our work and visual research onto the table to create a mood board so other groups could see what we were doing. From this we did a SWOT analysis. This helped us see our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and our threats. As a group we reviewed another groups work against the same criteria as this to help them see what they needed to do next. I think that doing this task I learned a lot because I could have a look at what other groups were doing which gave us some indication of how well we were working. Also marking another group’s work made me think about things that I can apply to my own work to help me get a clearer idea. Receiving feedback on our work from another group really helped us because it gave us a clear indication of where we were going right and where we were going wrong. What we learned from this was that we had lots of visual imagery and drawn work but not a particularly clear route in which it was going to go, which I believe we already knew but if it was clear to other people then we knew we had to do something about this. We also participated in learning the stages of group work session where we could asses ourselves as a group to figure out what level we were working on. Personally I feel that in my group I am working 2/3 because although I feel we are all putting our ideas forward and are getting on well, I think that our communication skills could be a lot better with one another. I feel this may be because we aren’t confident enough yet but hopefully this will get better the more time we spend working together. What I have found really helpful in communicating with the group is the group message we created at the start of the project using Facebook. This enables us to discuss our ideas and work when we are not together at university.

This is the mood board we laid out for our SWOT Analysis

Lines of Enquiry- Motif Development

From looking at things like sideshows and the darker side of fairgrounds we each started producing our own designs and motifs ready to be transferred onto screen for printing with. Although I felt that we still did not have a solid direction that we all wanted to go in. Because of this I was slightly disappointed in my own designs because I did not have a clear idea of where the group as a whole wanted to take the theme. Also I think that this was because we were trying to do so much in such a short space of time. Here are some of the motifs i created for our screen.

On our main screen we combined al of our motifs and designs so that they would all fit and we could use them all for printing. On our smaller screen we decided that we were going to use a pattern or a mark that would act as a background for us to print on to. As we weren’t too sure what we wanted to do for this I suggested using Brusho paints. I have used this technique previously, which is why I thought that it would create some really interesting marks which is what we were looking for. Below are the 2 designs we chose and combined to use on our small screen.