Esoteric Illusions

So for my Professional Practise module I am a part of a group of 10 Bath Spa students are putting on an exhibition in Walcot Chapel. We’ve spent the past few months planning and designing the posters, flyers and now it’s only 2weeks away. So now I’ve actually got to finish some work to put in it! I’m going with my Alice in Wonderland work. I’m going to get my blue dress finished by adding some embroidery around the hem. Then when I go home the weekend before we put up the exhibition me and my sister (who studied Photography at PCAD) are going to have a mini photo shoot in the woods by our house, so I’ll have some photos of the dress in context to hang next to the dress in the exhibition.

So everyone come along and see some great work from the creative arts students of Bath Spa! Hope to see you there!

Embroidered flowers, a closer look

There’s a limited amount of embroidery detail on the dresses of Alice but I’ve come across an embroiderer Pat Trott. Some of her main work involves creating 3D flowers out of stitch and it’s just when I see this image (of the garden of living flowers) I just think that this technique could be used effectively but yet still be subtle on a costume dress for Alice.

Pat Trott was introduced to embroidery by her mother and hers before her, the passion for it was almost passed down as well. She now teaches workshops and also at schools and colleges to share her embroidery. She has her 17 ‘techniques’ which can then be combined to make a number of different flowers as seen here. The same stitch can be used with different threads and sizes to create different effects and in her book Three-Dimensional Embroidery stitches she explains a shows them all so that anyone can create them as well.

What I like about this style is that I haven’t seen something like it before, and that I can now very easily recreate them myself. Obviously floral is probably one of the main subjects of detail when it comes to textiles but it’s the way the embroidery sits on the fabric, it’s raised which I kind of like.

On a dress for Alice I think perhaps the singular flowers could work as perhaps a border, or maybe a smaller image like this one but just on a pocket and then others dotted around, blending in but still bright enough to catch your attention.

Playing around with some playing cards

In photos like these you can really appreciate the time and energy spent in creating such an elaborate dress, with so many layers of netting it must have to keep its shape along with the little details that I’d never noticed till I’d never even seen these close up shots. That this dress is covered in hearts and daises, I really like the effect of the darker lines on the slightly opaque fabric which adds in the black and white but means that the red is still the strong main colour of the dress and is shown through. I also like that there’s a sketch of the design for the Queen of hearts costume shown behind Alice’s dress while it’s being exhibited, this shows where the main inspiration came from for this particular costume.

Here I’ve taken the shape of this Alice dress but then been making it my own. So I’ve been experimenting some more with taking aspects of playing cards and using the symbols and colours as inspiration for some dresses. I like the embroidery of heart and spades etc on the ribbons; I’d like to then apply them criss-crossing over the body of a dress and draping over the skirt.

So I’m defiantly going to continue with this theme of working as everyone is familiar with the character of Alice wearing the pale blue dress and an Alice band in her hair however, for Tim Burton's film costume designer Colleen Atwood wanted to create something new, with no disrespect for the older designs, but I think especially for this film during the plot when Alice is staying with the Red queen, all of her attendants are dressed in the same colour scheme (of black, white and red) and so I think here’s a reason to try Alice in some new colours. It’s a very lavish dress, it’s been made for the purpose to be fit for Alice being in the presence of a queen and I think that this dress is the one that most of all fits with the others from the earlier photo shoot. It’s not something you’d wear every day, but something to help her get into being the character that she has to put on, and it helps her become who she has to be in order to get what she needs.

Disney Joy

It’s nearly 100 days till I spend my summer working in Walt Disney World resort Florida for 3months so anything Disney related catches my eye at the moment and so with my Alice project on the go I feel that I can make it a bit more rounded by looking at other Disney tales as well only when it crosses into the fashion or costume world. 

Yesterday while on the train I saw the person next to me reading the paper beholding this image so it caught my eye but couldn’t really see what it was about, I assumed that it was an advertisement for a theatre production, however after researching I’ve discovered that it’s for a photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz, who also took the photo’s for an Alice in Wonderland shoot which I studied recently for a power point presentation. So I found it interesting to look through some more Disney breaking into the fashion world.

Just a few more flowers

So these are just a few more scans from my textiles sketch book. I seem to be going in two directions, it’s either flowers (The garden of living flowers) or playing cards which I’ll hopefully have some more work on by next week so can upload some of that. But for now flowers seem an important part of wonderland as they help colour Alice’s world.

These sketches are just examples of how a simple dress could then be transformed by embroidery. This rose dress would be covered in woven roses, one of the techniques from my post below which I learned from the book Three-Dimensional Embroidery stitches by Pat Trott. I’ve learned a lot from this book and even find myself using her techniques when I’m not even sewing flowers for woven roses are a great way to fill in a perfect circle.

So for now I think I’ll keep going with the flowers but I think it would be interesting to look more into to the playing cards, using the colour scheme of black, white and red perhaps as this would create something much different and I’m finding when I try and stick to the pale blue dress my work can get quite limited and here already I’m leaning towards different colours. This is the point of this sketch book to try different things as it’s alright if it’s not perfect, I’m just exploring, but do think if I were able to make more than one dress by the time of our American Museum show to have one pale blue dress along with a red dress covered in playing cards or even just the symbols, this could then be something quite different, so I’m quite excited by this.

Alice in Wonderland

 So (just noticed that I seem to start all my blogs with so, no point changing now!) for my Alice project I'm using an old Alice through the looking glass children's book as my sketchbook. I've had some comments that the words are in the way you can't see the drawings, but I like working in a book and what I'm doing is going through the book look at the illustrations of the tale and using them as inspirations for each design. So there've been detailing in a fireplace and then I turn it into detail on the skirt of a dress. I find that it's a good thing to have something to refer to right there on the next page as I'm working as I've got my research folder but sometimes forget what's actually in there and so I use main sources of inspiration from the folder but for the smaller details I like working from my sketch book.

So I go through drawing a sketch of a garment on each possible page then look into what detail, what technique of embroidery could be used to decorate it. Here for example is a sample is of the kind of embroidery that would be used to cover the top of this dress. Different techniques such as French knots and weaving were used to create some of these flowers.

Here's another example of my work from my sketch book. This was a chapter that I choose to look into playing and the different ways to use them for designs of decoration. Then a quick sample of the type of fabric that would be used and then I used some woven roses to create the main body of the sign of a club.

Next I'm going to be continuing through the book and filling it with designs and samples, while creating some larger pieces that that I'm not just confined to the smaller size of my sketch book.

Drawing through a book

 

 So I’ve never been very good a fashion drawings also just been teaching myself but the drawing will still always come out a bit funny and I’ve taken out books from the library but other than tracing from them haven’t really found them very helpful but then I found a really good one with some good step by step instructions about spacing and such so hopefully I’ll start to get the hang of it if I keep at it and then not have to keep referring to the book in the end!

So for art I’ve been looking at buildings and different illustrations and artists, but I always wanted to lead onto a more fashion based project, so in my research folder I’ve been collecting tear sheets of fashion shoots from magazines which are all set in and around buildings so that hopefully there’s a link there for now and then I can perhaps like the effect or texture of brinks and stones to the fabric for maybe a dress.

So these collections of drawings all lead up to one when the 3 are layered on top of each other. I started a new sketch book to be dedicated to fashion drawing so hopefully I’ll be able to see improvement throughout the book but the first couple are just of using geometric shapes to create the body and that just started to make the book look a bit boring so I added a thick black line of what an outfit could be for the theme that I’m going for and then with this one started to add more detail with the brown criss-cross behind the figure giving the impression of perhaps stones, bricks, to give an idea of where this outfit for a photo shoot would be shot but drew to the new detail on top of the brown paper you can tell that’s it’s not to colour of say the top but of the background.

So to add some more texture to this piece, to make it more that a sketch. I got the idea for a pair of sequined trousers from one of my tear sheets. Where the outfit is all black bar these sparkling trousers, so I drew a quick impression of them but you still couldn’t really see what it was meant to mean, so I thought that even though the proportions of the sequins would be completely wrong so instead of covering the top layer of drawing with them I stuck them underneath the lines and rows of drawn sequins so that the colour can be seen from underneath. 

So next I’m just going to be focusing on practising my fashion drawing and experimenting with more ways of how to give an impression of a pattern rather than having to draw out every little detail.