To begin BA week, I was told to create a concept board which resolved around an era and designer of my choice, I decided to look at designs from the 70’s which lead me onto discovering the textile designer Barbara Brown.
Lots of her designs can be seen in my concept board, I find her work really inspiring and love her colour palette styles. An element of her designs I decided to explore further into is how she incorporates regular shapes such as triangles, squares and circles into her work and then develops them into her personal style.
The aim of this project was to use elements of design from my concept board to create a shape on the stand, which can later help with finding a shape for a piece of clothing, specifically 3D. I was quite disappointed when reading the brief for this project, as from spending the past diagnostic stage using waste paper and recycled materials to create garment designs and illustrations from stand work, I would have hoped when working in a degree style project we would have been given the option to bring in fabrics to design or drape with, personally I would have found by doing that this project would have been more enjoyable and memorable as i find working with paper and waste materials very frustrating.
From looking at Barbara Brown’s work I decided to use the shape of a circle to develop on my stand work. The materials I brought in to create this with were old paper plates, string and paper straws. Unfortunately I lost the photos I took when developing designs on the stand but to create my 3D outcome, I cut into the paper plates so I had just the round outer perimeter to work with, to attach either end of the plates I hole punched them together and then used string to pull the ends together, creating a round 3D effect. After creating a number of these I successfully draped them round the mannequin, drawings small illustrations of my progress on paper whilst I experimented with the style of draping I desired.
The purpose of the paper straws was to add colour and interest to my 3D stand outcome, as it looked pretty plain and dull with just the plates around it. I used thick coloured pens to draw small and large designs on these paper straws which I found to look really effective. I then linked these together with string and intertwined them around the paper plates.
Overall I was really happy with my 3D outcome, although this project was not what I was expecting from a degree style workshop, it benefitted me to work with materials that I would never choose to design with, as well as being able to incorporate a well known textile designers work with my individual style of design.
