Hours of Illustrations

I am now working on the illustrations for my current research and design project. I have drawn all my illustrations by hand, scanned them in and am working into them with colour, using Photoshop. I have never used Photoshop to shade in colour before and am having to learn quickly to get these finished for Tuesday. I am quite pleased with the finished result so far but can't believe how long it has taken just to finish these 4! 4 down....12 to go.

Hidden Composition

For the second assignment in my Design Theory 2 module I was set the task of designing and writing a two page article for a fictitious magazine called 'Visual Analysis and Synthesis'. The article was to be an informative visual analysis of a piece of art of my choice. I chose to analyse the painting, Las Meninas, by Diego Velazquez. I looked at the underlying stucture of the painting, fitting 'the golden ratio' and 'golden rectangle' into the composition. I explored how the use of the 'golden ratio' produced an aesthetically pleasing scene.

Junya Watanabe, Molten Vintage

For one my modules at level 2, Research and Design Development I was set the task to design an autumn/winter collection for the Japanese conceptual designer, Junya Watanabe. For the first part of the project, I worked within a team to research the designer and his typical customer. We put together the customer board below to give us an overall view of the 'Watanabe customer'.

We then researched the trend predictions for autumn/winter 2010/11, to gain an insight on the up and coming trends. We kept these trends in mind when designing our mood board (shown below), however, didn't stick to them completely as throughout our research we found that Watanabe's style was not completely led by current trend.

We then chose a range of fabrics and components to use within our collections and designed a fabric board to display them.


The team work ended here and we split off to design our own collections. A few of my initial ideas pages are shown below.

I then went on to choose a range of garments for my final collection. I was to design 10 outfits and show them as fashion sketches illustrating the feel of the collection. I first drew my illustrations by hand, then scanned them into the p.c and used Photoshop to add colour. I am pleased with how they turned out, as this was my first attempt at fashion illustration.



We then had to show each of the garments as professional flat drawings. I used the software, Lectra, Kaledo Style to draw my flats. I enjoyed experimenting with this new programme although it crashed too many times! The stress was kind of worth it though because I think the flats look really professional. Here is one of my flat drawing boards:

Seeing stars

For one of my first semester modules, Design Theory 2, I was to complete an assignment based on periodic tiling designs. The task was to split both a triangle and hexagon into a number of polygons and then use these polygons to create 12 periodic tilings. These tilings were to be designed to fit our chosen theme and end use, in my case, a Moroccon themed mosaic tiled patio table. I started by putting together a selection of inspiration pictures and creating a color palette suitable for my chosen theme. Using Photoshop, I then cut my polygons, filled them with my chosen colours and painstakingly created my 12 tilings. Finally, I produced a mock-up of what the final product would look like and a table of costs and method of production.