Flotsam & Jetsam Project

With confidence I am able to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the project Flotsam and Jetsam and have achieved my desired outcome through researching primary and secondary resources; from our inspirational visit to “Dorset Beach” through to influences coming from contextual artist/designers.

Through this project I have acquired my own individual illustration techniques and have personally explored developing my designs to suit professional fashion illustrations. The brief stated us to design a garment inspired by the debris/ items washed ashore from a beach. When initially looking at the brief many items come to mind associated with the beach. However after observing my primary research, objects/ photographs collected at “Dorset beach,” I found that the obvious stereotyped features of a beach were non existent such as the Mauritius sea blue, sparkling sands and pristine waters. Taking this into consideration I decided to use the dominating colour in all my photographs and base my colour palette around muted browns, beiges, creams and deep mustards. I wanted to use natural earth colours taking inspiration from native beaches and contextual naturalists such as “Andy Goldworthy” and “David Nash.” Over the past few weeks I have been exposed to numerous fabric manipulation techniques; such as pleating, layering and fraying, felting, stitching, machine embroidery, ruching, dying, twisting, knotting, knitting and crochet. I have successfully applied these techniques, exploring a variety of materials, which are supported by relevant designers/ artist along with my personal illustrations.

I am extremely pleased with my final outcome and feel it links and supports my research extremely well. During the ongoing completion of this project I have acquired a strong appreciation and can now understand the importance for the design development cycle when reaching a final outcome. In this project I feel I have come to a final outcome appropriately visiting each stage of the design cycle. Starting the cycle with researching artists/designers, to personally responding to their work and then evaluating the progressing of my samples as I moved on throughout the project. The successful samples and ideas then enabled me to make well informed design developments of garment ideas. Exploring the ideas with loosely structures illustrations, using inks watered down enabled my ideas to be relevant to the dign development stage.  This then led me to reach an appropriate conclusion of my final design. Through this project I have come to realise my own personal illustration techniques and have developed a personal way of approaching a project and I feel this vital skill should support me in future projects.

I can now confidently approach a brief knowing clearly the design cycle stages in which to go through. I have also developed confidence and self belief in my own illustration styles and presentational techniques. To improve I think I could complete more illustrations using the ideas from artists work. Overall I am extremely pleased with the final outcome and project, and I feel I have reached my own personal targets for the project.