journals

i have been keeping a photographic journal of my studies for this project, with so many photos i felt it was the only way to keep them all together and accesible.. with a few words on each page to explain why i've included that photo. heres just a few of the pages..

getting art together

 

throughout this time i have been creating artwork from my photographs (a few of which were included earlier) .. i have been blocking out shapes and colours with paint/papers/photo negatives/photographs and pen. here are a few more..

go to print

using the colour theme from the group, and my own inluences from my research, we were asked to create another collage that was to then be printed on to fabric. here is my final piece, this is the fabric print.. the colours have varied slightly from the original (nothing's perfect!) but it is still close enough to demonstrate the overall idea. i havent used any of the deep blue in my collage, as i will only be using it as an accent colour in my fabrics.

going further..

next stop, holland. utrecht to be precise. my father works out there, and is lucky enough to have a beautiful apartment in the centre of Maarssen, a small town located close to the city of Utrecht. i took a short trip out to visit him and used the opportunity to take some photos of the architecture out there. the styles out there are so different to buildings back here in england.. especially evident in the traditional.

a view from the river - even between just these 5 houses, each one is different from the next. what i love is that there is so much detail, so much care and attention has been taken to make every one individual and very beautiful. i hope to try and create this in my fabrics as well. if i were to pump up the colours in this photo - make the brick red redder and the blue sky deeper blue, it would be just perfect to show the colours our group has settled on - a deep red, a deep blue and a selection of neutrals.  

im going to create some mixed media art work from these images and others i took on my trip - playing around with texture, scale and colour to try and get the most out of the pictures. there are already obvious shapes in here that i could try and create within my weaves.. but im going to play around with them a bit first to see what i can get.

all in all, a very successful trip. 

adventures

time to visit places, take photos.. produce art. first stop, hotels. a journey around the luxurious world of high end boutique and art hotels to get an idea of what we're getting ourselves into, and to hopefully figure the following:

• who's the market?
• how will the fabrics be used?
• how often hotels refurb rooms .. how long does the fabric need to last??
• what kind of styles do the hotels go for?

pictures to follow once ive uploaded them to my computer from these trips. 

i did discover, generally the market here is for the over 25s, the pricing of rooms putting most of them out of reach for students sadly! but for professional types, couples, honeymooners, weddings, people who've retired.. generally people with a taste for luxury and with the cash flow to aid this. the hotels usually offer family rooms, though a few in the city centre of manchester, one being Velvet, only had double or king rooms.. no rooms for more than 2 people. not entirely children friendly! i found that many of the smaller hotels chose to have a different theme for each room, varying drastically between them. giving an exciting wealth of fabrics and styles, leaving much scope for me as the designer, and for our whole group when choosing a colour theme to run with for our range.

collage-ing

a selection of collages produced for this project. not perfect, but a starting point for the theme of my project. rather than cutting images out of magazines or newspapers and compiling them together to make a collage (more a montage in my eyes), ive looked at images in magazines, and then used a variety of papers, photographs, and anything else i could get my hands on, to recreate these images.. but with a bit of a twist. ive scaled up and scaled down for compositions sake.. and used foam pads to create dimension in the collages (which the photo sadly does not show well - sorry!). these aren't in the colours our group has decided upon, but these were created prior to that meeting. still, they're a useful kickstart. 

Urban Footprint

"eclectic" - where to start? it could mean a million things, but i chose to take a look at the impact of architecture and the shapes within buildings, structures, bridges, walls, bollards.. anything that is man made and sitting alongside the natural. how we have adapted our surroundings to best suit us.. and then on some occasions, abused our own hard work. from all this , i will take a selection of my work to provide inspiration for a set of woven fabrics.