Out With The Old, In With The New..

Soo as the new college term approaches and September creeps up on us, i have decided to opt for a full fringe! The side floppy fridge has now gone and i am now left with a pixie cut and full fringe. Take a look at the picture below!

I have a feeling September will be a good month, after a hard few months. College term starts in a couple of weeks and it will be the start of my second year at fashion, determined to do as well as i did at the end of first year! Also its my 18th birthday! This calls for a right fashion knees up which I'm very much looking forward to! Next week my boyfriend is coming back from traveling in America for 2 months so I'm hoping to be receiving a fair few presents which i shall be posting! Also trying to convince him to start up a blog for all his pictures as he does like to travel a lot.

Anyway thumbs up for a good month! 

Evening Wear Final Photos

So after weeks of planning and making, i finally came to the end of making my evening wear outfit which consists of a top, skirt and corsage accessory. The theme for evening wear was abstract art from which i could design from, also thank you to my best friend, Etta for being my model for my outfit! Enjoy looking!

Just Can't Get Enough!

For those of you who know me then you will know that my hair is short like Frankie Sandford from The Saturdays, and you will also know that she is one of my biggest style icons! 

She pulls off the short hair so well and inspired me to go short myself, which i have been for about 3 years now. Before that i had super long hair which was wavy and i had a full fringe. Just reading magazines and seeing how good short hair looked on girls was what persuaded me. Ever since then i find myself loving whatever she wears and i think she proves the whole stereotype of "boys have short hair not girls" being wrong. I also personally think that short hair looks great on girls and really shows off their facial features. 

So i went and got my hair cut yesterday and i have recently been deciding to go a bit shorter than i normally would and i got home and went on my laptop to check out what was going on in the celebrity world. This was one of the stories from heatworld.com 

http://www.heatworld.com/Star-Style/2011/06/Frankies-new-hair-cut---yay-or-nay/

Looks like Frankie's gone shorter too! There are lots of comments about whether she can pull this off but i definitely think so! It really shows off the her great face shape! For me a way to express your style and a huge fashion accessory is your hair which is why i chose to have such a strong hairstyle for a girl :)

Schoools Ouut Forrr Summerrr!

So this is it! First year as a fashion student at college is over! Not going to lie there have been ups and downs through out the year but i have made it through! Even if i do say so myself i was rather pleased with the grade i received for my final project which was a distinction! 

So during my first year i have learnt so much i never knew about the fashion world which has really opened my eyes about my future. I think overall i have had a successful year making and designing and creating my blog of course! One of the best things about being at college this year has to be some of the amazing people i have met and will stay friends with throughout our fashion lives! Its hard to imagine that this time next year we will all be about a week away from completing a diploma in fashion! 

Not to worry, over the summer i will still keep on blogging and even after i have left college i will still carry it on along with my website. Now very much looking forward to a relaxing, fashion inspiring summer and blogging what takes my fancy and sharing with you lot! I shall also be posting some photos of my final project this year during this week. Keep on blogging!

Hussein Chalayan Autumn/Winter 2000

This is a video of Hussein Chalayan's Autumn/Winter collection from 2000. I saw this video and found it really amazing that he could create outfits from such simple objects like chairs and tables. Definitely a good watch and just proves that anything can be fashionable.

Visual Recordings

These are two images below which i have made and scanned into the computer before using Photoshop to incorporate the scanned patterns into a fashion illustration from http://elisefaye.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/simpleline.jpg

I firstly made the patterns using various techniques include dyes, acetates and wax. I made one pattern which was lighter and one pattern which was darker. I then scanned them into the computer and i could edit them on Photoshop by changing the colours, contrast and hue/saturation. I could also make them in to patterns to use in the paint bucket tool. 

I then took my fashion illustration off the internet and went on to work on filling in the line drawing. I used the polygonal tool to cut out parts of the illustration and fill it back with my patterns. When the pieces were cut out i could use other Photoshop tools to change the opacity and colours of the segments. 

Dark Pattern

Light Pattern

Fashion Illustration

Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2001

This video shows part of the catwalk by Alexander McQueen for his collection for Spring/Summer 2001. McQueen was known for his extreme sense of productions for his runways and catwalks, which this video shows. this catwalk in particular shows the models who walk down their catwalk unable to see the audience. the edegs of the runway were mirrored so the models couldnt see anything but themselves while the audience could see everything they were doing. There was also at the begining of the video where the box opened and the model was inside, there were real life moths and flies emerging from it as well. McQueen was a huge talent who loved the prospect of adding shock value to not only to his collections but also the catwalks he put on.

Lady Gaga: The Monster Ball Tour March 2010

On March 3rd 2010 i saw Lady Gaga at her Monster Ball Tour at Cardiff International Arena. Her support acts were Alphabeat and Semi Precious Weapons. The first song she sang to open the show was Dance In The Dark. She sang songs from her first and second album, The Fame and The Fame Monster. During the whole concert she puts on an amazing show and interacts with the fans. designers who influence the outfits she wears include Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy. Lady Gaga, who is most famous for her crazy sense of style, certainly gave the crowd a show with her performances. Some of the sets included a large scaffholding which she opened the show to, a piano which was on fire, the monster ball spinning ring, a giant moving fish and of course the infamous disco stick! She also spoke out about how much her fans mean to her and calls them her little monsters!
Throughout the show she had many outfit changes. Her outfits included..

Here were some of the videos from the show! Enjoy!

Lady Gaga - Bad Romance

Speechless - Lady Gaga


All in all the best show i have been to and would definitely buy tickets for her next show! :)

Future Beauty: 30 Years Of Japanese Fashion

On Wednesday 12th January we all took a trip to the Barbican in London to take a look at the Future Beauty: 30 Years Of Japanese Fashion exhibition. The exhibition brings together the work of the avant-garde Japanese fashion designers of the 1980s to the present day and shows a contrast between Japanese and European fashion. The designers included Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo who all had parts of their collections on display, who had an enormous impact on the world’s couture in the late 20th Century. They are also designers who involve peformance art in their catwalks to project the inspiration and influence behind their collection.

  Instantly looking at the clothing on display it was clear that they were pieces of art rather than pieces of clothing based for practicality.  There were drapes coming down from the ceiling, surrounding pieces of work by each designer, with each outfit on its own individual stand and small description of what it was. The pictures show just a small amount of the work on show. The techniques used challenged Western notions of beauty and redefined previous notions of fashion.

Independent Project: 1950s Influential Fashion

For the independent project i chose to make a garment which was influenced by 1950s fashion. I firstly wrote myself a brief which was the aim i gave myself for the project. The aim i gave myself was to research the fashion in the 1950s and to design 4 different garments based on my research. The most successful design that i chose to make, i porduced a working drawing for it and then i could start making it. After drawing up the working drawing i then looked in to different materials and fabrics to use that was relevant to both the theme and the design. I chose to use a polyester type material as the top layer with a netting layer underneath as the under skirt. For the waistband i chose to use this satin material which looked nice when tied up as a bow. The process i used for making the skirt was mainly using the gathering stitch to create the ruffled shape and to give the skirt volume and shape. i made the skirt to fit my best friend who i used as my model and i could get a realistic idea of what it would look like when it was finished. The first part of the skirt i made was the two layers by sewing the gathering stitch and then sewing at the back, leaving room for the zip. I then stitched the zip in and tubed the material to make the bow. The final part was to attach the waistband to the skirt, trapping the raw edges of the outer layers inside it. Once the skirt had been completed all that was left to do was to put it on the model i made it on so i could take photographs to be printed off. 

The photos below are the ones i printed and handed in along with the skirt and my sketch book as evidence of the project.

Back view

Front View

Side View

Fashion Illustration: Urban Textures Line Drawings

For the final part of the fashion illustration task i then used a fashion illustration line drawing which i got from: http://elisefaye.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/simpleline.jpg

The main tool i used for this part of the task was the polygonal tool which let me select parts of the drawing free hand. I selected different parts of the illustration which were unregistered and didn't fit line to line exactly. This gave me a selection to play around with and interpret my urban textures into.

After making the selection on the drawing i then cut exactly the same shape out of the urban texture and it then gave me the shape to drag and drop into the illustration.

As this was just a cut out of the image i used other tools to change different properties about the cut out. For example on the clothing, after i had cut the pieces out i then changes things like the contrast and the colour balance by going on Image, Adjustments.

I also used the paint bucket tool to fill in sections like her tights and her skin. This tool was hidden behind the gradient tool so i clicked over it and held to open the paint bucket tool. I then clicked the colour chart to select the colour i wanted and i could then change the brightness and the opacity of the colour. This was on the right hand side of the screen and you can change the percentage to make it more or less opaque.

The final part of the process was saving the image as a JPEG and uploading the illustraion to my blog.

Fashion Illustration: Urban Textures

For the next part of the assignment i went out and took rubbings of urban textures. I took about 15 rubbings of textures such as the computer keyboard, lift buttons and the buttons on my blackberry. After taking the rubbings i could then use the photocopier to copy them. I inverted the colours of the photocopies so that the background was black instead of the white of the tracing paper.

The photocopies of the rubbings could then be scanned in to the computer so they were ready for me to work on to on Photoshop. After scanning in the images i opened them up on to Photoshop and used different tools to manipulate the rubbings. The first change i needed to make to the scanned images was that the image size needed to be changed so i could save them. I went on the Image, Image Size and changed the size from pixels to percentage and reduced the size by half. Once the size had been changed i then used tools which were mainly under Image, Adjustments.

The tools in particular which i used was Colour Balance, Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation. There was also a tool called Invert which i could use to invert the scale of the colour. I could also copy and paste layers, of which i could then cut pieces out of each layer using the Lasso Tool and clearing the selected section. The area which was cleared could then show through the layer which was underneath and the background layer.

Once i had manipulated the scanned rubbings i could then import images of things that represented urban. I imported images of maps to use and used the same tools to manipulate them so they fitted in with the rubbings.

I used the same principal for all three of my scanned rubbings by opening and manipulating them in photoshop and the outcome of each illustration is below.  

As the illustrations had to have urban textures i impoted images of maps on each rubbing separately. On each one i moved the maps on to different layers so on some it was hidden behind the top layer and on top of the background layer. As the images had sections cut out of them, the maps showed through in places on the outcome.  

To make the maps fit in with the urban texture theme and in with the rubbings after they had been edited on Photoshop, they also needed to be manipulated. 

I firstly used the tools on Photoshop to change the colour balance of the image. I went on to Image, Adjustments and Colour Balance and worked with the colours to make them relevant to the images. 

Some of the maps i used the colour invert tool and also the contrast.

As the final outcome images were also a large sixe i made them smaller by repeating the process of going to Image, Image Size and changing the pixels to percentage and making them smaller than 100% so they could be saved and uploaded on to the blog.

Fashion Issustration Assignment: Research

What is fashion illustration?

Fashion illustration is the communication of fashion that originates with illustration, drawing and painting. It is usually commisioned for reproduction in fashion magazines as one part of an editorial feature or for the purpose of advertising and promoting fashion makers, fashion boutiques and department stores. Fashion Illustration has been around for nearly 500 years. Ever since clothes have been in existence and there was a need to translate an idea or image into a garment there has been a need for fashion illustration. Not only do fashion illustrations show a representation or design of a garment but also served as a form of art.



Bec Winnel





Bec Winnel

 Bec Winnel: Bec Winnel is a fashion illustrator who creates soft illustrations which show emotion. She works using a pale colour pallet and crates illustrarions by building and blending delicate and detailed layers of colour pencil, pastel and and graphite. She works as a full time designer and part time as an exhibiting artist and commercial illustrator. I like this fashion illustrsator because of the way she uses pale and pastel colours which gives the illustrations a realistic look.

 

Katharine Asher





Katharine Asher

Katharine Asher: Katharine Asher works as a freelance issustrator and designer, specialising in figurative work and focussed on her traditional drawing skills and the ability to work in 3D. She uses this skill as the backbone of her work and uses a wide variety of commercial sources from publishing and advertising to film. I like the way that this illustrator uses light scribbles in her illustrations to give effect.

 

Nuno Da Costa: Nuno Da Costa is a self taught fashion illustrator specialising in fashion and beauty imagery. Her illustrations fall in to 2 cagegories mainly: Colour and Black and White brush work. They are hand drawn and a brushed with water colours and then scanned, retouched and painted in photoshop. I particularly like the way the illustrations look sophisticated and elegant.



Steve Pattison



Steve Pattison: Steve Pattison creates illustrations which are both modern and unique in their own approach. The illustrations are centred around an aggressive use of line and colour, mixed with strong graphic overtones and unusal use of composition. He creates his illustrations combining modern and traditional methods by using pencil, ink, ink wash, spraypaint and stencil which is then finished in Photoshop. I like the way the illustrations have a graffiti style sense about them.

Steve Pattison