I just realised that I went through the entire first year without doing anything about florals. This is amazing! When I came here I wanted to push myself to try new things and keep my themes and ideas fresh, and I feel like I have done that quite well. So here I am at the end of the project. This week I’ve been working on developing my ideas further, pushing through layers of mishaps almost as plentiful as the number of layers my designs end up having on Photoshop. Yeah. Anyway. A lot of my design ideas didn’t rely on my animal hybrid caricatures as much as I thought, which was interesting – I got a bit distracted when I hit on a new way of developing abstract compositions by picking out certain shapes from a single image, abstracting and layering them, like so:
Change the hue/saturation levels a few times and – boom! A whole new springboard of ideas to work with. I did experiment with working animals over the top but I’m not sure how well that’s gone; it still looks a little busy to me…
At the very least I’ve tried to be bold with colour as per usual. Maybe I’m lacking texture this time, and haven’t come up with as many weird scenes/croquis as I would like, but I am really pleased with the abstract geometric stuff. Another skill to add to my repertoire!
I’ve also experimented with draping; for some reason I keep coming back to having my designs splashed over t-shirts. I think that’s a reasonable possibility? I’m reminded of brands like Lazy Oaf and their simplistic style that’s splashed brightly across skirts, dresses and t-shirts. I have definitely moved away from pop-ups, which was in my original proposal, but I’d like to do a self-lead project on these over the summer because papercraft is still something I’m interested in and I want to challenge myself with 3D work in some way, at some point.
I’ve come towards the end of this project feeling very inspired in general. I have a lot of research to do with regard to print design, illustration, digital art and photography, and I’m hoping to use the summer to teach myself some new things I can take with me to second year. This week has mostly been about consolidating what I already know and setting the scene for some future ideas. I could have experimented more with regard to digital art techniques, digital printing and such, but… yeah. Unfortunately it just didn’t pan out that way, due to time constraints and other upheavals. However I’m going forward with a strong idea of what I need to do.
It’s been a challenging first year, but an absolutely invaluable one.
A Critical Journal. 