Smoke and Mirrored Designs

Beginning with the design work for Part 2, I felt more confident that I did before. I felt quite uplifted by the outcomes of my mirrored designs from Session 1 and was excited to work with them to come up with some garment designs.

I began by drawing muses over 6 of my mirrored images. I chose 6 separate designs for this, as I wanted to explore the shapes of more of them. For my muses, I used some from part 1 but also experimented a bit with continuous line drawing muses drawn digitally. I used both a sketchbook app on a tablet and Photoshop to create these variations. On the sketchbook app, I did some light drawing, just playing with lines and colour, and on Photoshop, I meshed together with the muses from part 1 and some extra limbs.

I then moved away from this to drawing over the top of my images. I think I slightly misunderstood the brief for this section of the SDS, however, I feel like this ultimately gave me more options in the end for my design choices, which for me is definitely a positive thing. I used the same sketchbook app on my tablet and focused on creating basic lines for shapes and silhouettes over the images, assessing the details more later in my doodles.

After this, I began drawing my doodles for the 6 different designs. For this part I hand drew, as I found this to be the easier option to draw multiple ideas at once and really just freehand with any extra details I wanted to add. I’m not particularly good with quick rough sketches, so I did about 3 or 4 for each design that I spent about 3-4 minutes on each. I also tried to extract a variety of garments from most of the designs to give my collection a good range. I didn’t go in too harsh with the details either as Ed Ruscha is not very detail-oriented in terms of his artworks and produces more linework than any sort of pattern. To resonate my design with Gucci, I plan to use a range of fabrics that reflect the brand, although I did also try and keep my previous collection designs in mind when drawing.

Quite angular and structured and I could extract a few different garment shapes from it
I found it hard to recreate this shape, but could see it as a blazer/ cape (link to previous collection) and could also be a flared trousers design
Played with narrower and wider dress styles as well as a cropped jacket of sorts
Strapless element, as well as angular top and trousers
Favourite dress idea that relates back to previous collection with shoulder structure
Harder to diversify ideas but liked the off shoulder tiered dress

I feel like my drawing and attitude towards drawing have improved significantly since the last part of this unit and when doing this I felt more relaxed and open to ideas. I think this could be due to the fact that I know these ideas are open to whatever development I want them to have and that they will eventually become a collection that reflects my process. From these doodles, I narrowed my final design choices down to my 5 favourite pieces (as I liked more than just 3 of them).

Moving on to my development pages, I put together a page for each design that shows a mix of doodles, drawings over the image, my muse drawings, and the garment drawn onto a figure. I drew up the figures digitally once again and put the pages together in Photoshop, using collage paper in the background for a crafty effect (similar to the laid-out pages I made in part 1). I also added some simple annotations where necessary. I feel like these pages really highlight the process of my designs up until this point and also allowed me to get a really good understanding of the shapes of the garments and how they interact with possible muses and on figures.

Going forward, I’m excited to look into how I can incorporate colours and fabrics into my designs and more importantly how they can elevate the simplicity of my designs. I’m also frankly looking forward to finishing off my design classes with my best foot forward, as it’s highly likely I’ll never be doing design again! I’m feeling quite excited about completing this work though and really giving it my best effort, going forward with designs that I actually feel quite comfortable with and have enjoyed creating.