7 January 2015

Annual DP(design process) time has come! — take a look back and plan next

Term1 started slow but passed quickly.
The theme of my final project is building sites and construction. I selected this theme because of three reasons. Firstly, I was attracted by boldness and heaviness of materials. Secondly, I liked brightness and strong contrasts of painted colours. And the third is, how the first and the second are opposed to general impressions of embroidery.

Embroidery has a very long history in many regions around the world, and the fine pieces by skilled craftsmen (and often housewives) are seen in museums and art books. This type of traditional embroidery seems to be independent from contemporary embroidery techniques, and thus traditional hand embroidery is less popular within contemporary embroiderers while machine embroidery is becoming popular in textile industry.  It was natural for me to challenge the combination of two —traditional and new— so that I can demonstrate the traditional stitches are still great techniques as means of creating new textiles in this contemporary world. With my intention to reconstruct the general impression towards embroidery, I am going to have three key words—bold, masculine and modern.

As a starting point, I selected and combined multiple research photos. The result was satisfactory but I needed to translate the photo collages into coloured paper version, in order to analyse colours and shapes. Paper collages helped myself to consider about compositions and colour combinations, but a lot of details and texture have been dismissed in the process of simplification.

To focus on texture and details, I had an idea of getting inspiration from completely different themes. Melted candies and candles have been set as the second theme, however, it did not work together with the original theme and I abandoned this idea at the end.

Although the previous attempt drifted myself from the mainstream, I was able to try out many different materials. Also, this experiment added 3D qualities to my work, and accordingly the second half of term1 was spent mainly on 3D exploration. Firstly, I am interested in clay. The clay objects were good enough in terms of texture, but forms and sharpness were far less satisfactory; therefore I had to find another way of expression. Second challenge was painting on wood board, however, again it was not successful because of mixed dull colours and rectangle templates. Finally I found foam boards as the best material to work with.


Unlike clay, farm boards are still flat without manipulation, and I had an idea to solve this problem—layering. Layering is very simple but effective way of giving 3D quality to drawing, and I liked it. Artists such as Frank Stella is looked as Secondary research. First challenge of farm board 3D objects are still small, less texture and even colours are not as fresh as my 2D paper collage. Therefore I decided to double the size, and made texture and colour samples beforehand. Not all samples are successful but I am still happy with some of details on texture samples, and applied them to bigger layered objects.

 
My first consideration about my textile design was textile design for menswear, however, after 3 months of exploration I started thinking that my designs do not necessarily need to be fit into garment shapes. In this new term, I am going to find out the best way of presenting my textiles, as well as developing my designs as embroidery.

6 January 2015

small 2D drawings


Considering about compositions and colour combinations through painted paper collages.