Sabine Pieper

As I am now in the Textile Design for Fashion area, I wanted to look at some fashion illustrators. I also wanted to look at some styles of illustration before I began work for my Mary Katrantzou competition entry.

I was looking at Elle UK Magazine and noticed that on the last page, an illustrator called Sabine Pieper draws contemporary outfits for Elle, to illustrate their articles. I decided that I wanted to look further into the kind of work that she does and I was blown away.

The style of them is amazing and I'm quite intrigued as to how she achieves such a look. I'm almost certain that they're completed on photoshop.

I feel that the style of her illustrations would be quite appropriate to the way that I want my own fashion illustration to look. I want to inject some of my own style into it and I think that I would use mostly hand drawn techniques but I would be open to trying editing it on photoshop afterwards.

For my own illustrations, I would like to adopt such a style and it would give me a good oppertunity to perhaps hand draw my illustration and then alter and edit on photoshop.

Mary Katrantzou competition

Mary Katrantzou is one of my favourite designers. Her prints can not be beaten in my opinion and her application to structured dresses is both unique and innovative. This year she was awarded the "Young Designer of the year" at the Elle Style awards, another achievement to add to an ever growing string.

As a big fan of her work, I follow her on Twitter and like her page on Facebook, allowing me to keep up to date with any design development ideas etc.

Yesterday, it came to my attention that her PR team have organised a competition, encouraging participants to send their styling interpretations of a piece of Mary Katrantzou. This really excited me and I've decided that I'm going to enter. It's a long shot but the prize is tickets to her show at London Fashion week, so I'm going to give it a go

As Julie told us, she wants us to do a drawing a day over the christmas period, so I've decided that entering competitions is a good way of drawing for a dual purpose- for the course and for competition purposes.

Cy Twombly

After looking at the ways in which Wolfgang Tillmans documents his subjects through photography, I wanted to look an artist that uses drawing and perhaps text within their work.

I have loved the work of Cy Twombly since I was initally introduced to him whilst studying A-Level art and I knew that he was the one to look at, especially when looking at text combined with drawing. The image above shows the use of pencil crayon and paint alongside rough sketches. These are then placed with handwritten text that is quite ambiguous and unreadable which is what I find quite fascinating with it.

I was first inspired to look at drawing with text when taking part in the drawing exercise. During the instruct someone "out of a maze" task, I started to use text in conjunction with my drawing and Nigel encouraged me to do more of them.

I feel that it will fit in with my chosen theme too, which is a bonus.

I am so intrigued by what Twombly was trying to say in these drawings. I like the way that you can make out some of the full words and in some instances just the odd letter here and there. Combined with the quite free and child-like drawings of a bike and what looks like a rocket ship just makes me even more curious as to what he was trying to convey.

I want my work to be intriguing and for the viewer to question and maybe apply their own narrative to the drawings and evetually the garments I am going to design whilst in Textile design for Fashion.

Wolfgang Tillmans

After becoming aware that the theme of the new unit would be data, I wanted to look at some initial artists that I feel would be revelant to my idea. I wanted to look at artists that documented their ideas, whether that be through photography, drawing or other means.

I decided to look at the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, a fine art photographer who I was familiar with and I was aware that he documents and photographs things that interest him. The title of the book "if one thing matters, everything matters" implies that he considers the smaller things in life to be as significant as the major life events that occur.

When looking through Tillmans' book, I discovered that he keeps a diary of things of importance to him. The images appear to be disjointed and don't have a relationship with one another, as you would typically expect with a series of photographs. However they do share one thing in common- they matter to him.

I like the idea of documenting everything with a camera, however I have decided that I'm going to refine this right down and I want to base my project on doors.

I'll be interested to see if I can focus on layout in a similar way to Tillmans and allow the photographs to have a relationship with one and other.

I love the way that the subjects of the photographs are very unrelated and unexpected. They can even be shocking and sexually explicit but the honesty of them carries a lot of meaning and allows the audience to create their own "stories" about the images.

I also want to look at drawing a lot as well as photography so it would be beneficial to look at an artist that draws as well as photographs.

Drawing exercises

Today was the beginning of a new set of drawing exercises that will be completed in the next fortnight.

Initially, I was a bit sceptical of taking part in the exercises as I've already completed many exercises that are similar whilst doing my art A-Level as well as my foundation course. I just thought "here we go again" but eventually I did quite enjoy the drawing processes.

We were restricted by a set of rules given to us to produce a drawing of concentric circles that were no more than 3mm apart, resulting in the image, left.

It was performed using the opposite hand that you were used to which meant that the lines had a different quality to ones that you would produce using your usual hand.

The lines almost take the appearance of contour lines on a map rather than the intended concentric circles that appear on the inner cross-section of a long.

The control was taken away from us in another way by drawing the same drawing, this time attaching the media to a long stick and using it as an extention of your arm. I found this extrememly difficult. All control was taken away and it was a constant battle to even get the charcoal to hit the area of the paper that you intended it to. This resulted in much scrappier and shaky lines, with an accidently achieved scratchy quality to them.

Then after the inital two exercises, we were told to create a drawing "to instruct someone to find their way out of a maze" using the lessons learned in the previous two exercises. I decided to use the alternate hand technique and draw and write using my left hand. It is difficult and can cause some physical pain but the quality of the line is noticably different when compared with the usual hand drawings.

Evaluation of Origins unit.

This unit was quite a difficult unit to start. At the beginning, it was difficult to know whether what work I was doing was appropriate and whether or not the staff would like the direction that I was taking my work in.

However, I soon realised that I had to get over any apprehension that I may have had as I knew a substantial body of work would be expected of me and I needed to produce a certain style of work to allow the tutors and members of staff to see how I worked most comfortably.

By nature, I am a perfectionist. I often create work that takes a lot of time and patience to complete to a standard that I am happy with, such as the pieces, left. This piece took a lot of time and meant that I perhaps could have produced more work had I decided to not complete these pieces. However, I enjoy working on something until it reaches the high and professional standard that I set myself.

Furthermore, even though some pieces in my sketchbook and a lot of my work outside of my studio sketchbook took a long amount of time, it did not interfere with my time management and I ensured that I completed all of the set tasks on time, such as the technical file containing my knitting samples, mood and colour boards etc.

I also allowed myself enough time to create some new knitting samples that reflected my sketchbook such as the image below.

This unit taught me how to interpret the drawings within my sketchbook through other techniques and media such as knit and weave.

I felt as though I managed to seek out my own contextual research well. I found a good level of personally sourced trend reasearch to ensure that my work would have a market and would be sellable within the textile industry. I also enjoy reading journals such as Elle Magazine and ensured that I kept an eye out for any contextual references that may have been relevant to my own practice.

Overall, I feel as though this unit has taught me that I can work in a way that I feel is personal and that I enjoy and it still allows me to manage my time and meet deadlines with time to spare. I feel as though I have worked extremely hard throughout this unit and it paid off and I acheieved a mark that I am proud of.