Week 5- Application of designs

On Friday of week 4 I had a talk with one of my tutors about the progress of my project. At this point I was only thinking about producing the actual prints to transfer onto fabric, therefore it seemed much more like a textiles project than a graphics project. The tutor put forward the idea of giving the designs a reason to exist, suggesting that my prints could be used for a fashion/homeware brand's collection e.g. spring/summer 2017.
I agreed that my project needed an extra push as I was feeling a bit stuck and limited with ideas, however I was a bit hesitant about what she suggested as I thought I may not be able to accomplish all the branding and advertising elements of the idea as I didn't know wether there would be enough time for that as well as producing more designs and doing the actual fabric printing.
Despite my initial reluctance we decided that I could produce a collection for an existing brand rather than making my own as this would be like doing 2 projects in one, something I might have been able to do at the beginning of FMP but probably not 4 weeks in.

I then got to brainstorming ideas of how I could tailor my final outcome around this new idea. I thought about making my final outcome a display of the chosen brand's new collection, showing this through a poster, magazine spread or leaflet and maybe an example of the printed fabric.

I decided that the first thing I needed to do was find a brand for which my designs might be relevant so that my collection would fit in with the brands style or even give it a completely new direction/identity.
My leaf design that I produced last week really reminded me of Adidas' recent clothing collection as they seem to use a lot of interesting prints, incorporating them into their well known "trefoil" logo. I therefore experimented with applying my own designs as they have done, using the negative space within their logo to reveal part of my design.

Doing this also lead me to think of another famous sports brand, Nike, and how I might be able to incorporate the same technique that adidas use.

I quite liked both of these outcomes and feel the mock up fitted in well with Adidas' theme and gave the Nike shoes a different look. However I was less keen on designing for a fashion brand and wanted to base my designs for this project on a brand that wasn't as big, as Nike and Adidas are huge world renown brands.

In light of this discovery I started to look at different homeware brands, big and small and the products they usually sell, focusing on their different looks and how my designs might relate/fit in with the ethos of the brands.

I though this was a good opportunity to return to my initial FMP research as at the beginning of the project I was very keen on producing hand-painted/drawn illustrations that could be applied to bedding and other homeware products. One of the brands I was looking at were Bluebellgray who's surface designs/prints are all handprinted and then scanned to create these lovely watercolour illustrated floral prints. As this was part of my initial inspiration, my designs that I have produced so far in the project contain elements seen in these designs, as often I combined both hand drawn and painted images with photographs. Because of this, my designs might fit in well with Bluebellgray's overall look however I feel their designs might be a bit too traditional and therefore my more digitally based prints might seem a bit out of place in their brand.

I also came across this website called "Print all over me" where you can upload your designs and apply them to the product templates/silhouettes they provide. They will then print them and send them to you. You can chose to share your designs with other customers and every time someone purchases your design you'll receive at least 20% of the sale. This seemed like a good alternative to using the facilities at uni to print my fabrics however this was a lot more expensive and I wouldn't get to make the finished products myself.

When researching this I also saw an interesting pattern on a cushion and experimented by doing my own version. 

In addition, I looked at companies including Laura Ashley, Designers Guild and Cath Kidston who do interesting things with different forms of nature imagery. I really liked Laura Ashley and Designer's Guild's use of embroidery to illustrate floral imagery.
I loved how delicate and detailed this looked on the linen and thought that I might be able to do something like this on my printed designs, combining digital fabric printing with embroidery.

In one of my group crits another student said that my designs reminded them a bit of Ted Baker's surface designs on their products. I then went about researching their products and really liked what  I found. Although they included similar themes all of their prints seemed to be very different, wether it was different colour combinations or ways in which the images were created. I really liked their use of collage to create some of their prints and the marble affect they created, not sure how they did the later but I thought about using a spatula or something flat to move acrylic paint across a page and blend different colours together. I also thought this looked quite similar to another student in the graphics group's experimentation dragging type across a scanner. I thought about maybe doing this with one of my images or paintings, the result of which I could layer with other photographs/images to create a marbled affect similar to the Ted Baker prints.

(Water colour splashed scanned and moved)

I then went about applying my designs to pictures of white bedlinen on photoshop. This surprisingly took a long time as it was very hard to make the design look part of the actual bed covers. I did a mixure of cutting out and erasing to try to get the right 3D looks. I thought that this might be a possible way of displaying my designs for the final piece instead of printing the actual fabric, however this wouldn't be as aefective as if the viewer could see and touch the product in real life.



On Wednesday of this week I went to speak to the technician in the prototyping lab about getting my designs printed onto fabric. I was a bit nervous to be honest because I haven't used any of the equipment here before let alone the heat press. Despite my reluctance to go and ask, when I did she was very helpful and it didn't seem as bad as I thought. However I then had to make more designs, get my fabric and go to a pre planned exhibition all in Wednesday evening/Thursday as my booking for the fabric printing was on Friday of this week. Using inspiration from the Ted Baker products that I had looked at earlier on in the week along with some ideas I had, I experimented with layering different images, paintings and drawings on photoshop and by the end of the day on Wednesday I had come up with more designs I could use during my fabric printing session.

I was worried that by doing them in one day they would be rushed and not very well thought out but I ended up being happy with the final outcomes.
Here are a few examples of what I came up with:

Using eraser and lasso tool on photoshop to create a collage effect as seen in some of Ted Baker's designs. To create this I used one of my photographs of woodland that I used earlier on in the project, a picture of a diffusing bath bomb that my sister had taken previously but that I thought would create an interesting effect when layered with other images, a picture of flowers and also a rose taken from google images.

In theory I thought I would really like this outcome however once I had created it I didn't know wether it seemed a bit too busy with all the different images.

For this piece I layered the scanned and moved image of watercolour splashes seen above, the same picture of a diffusing bath bomb and image of flowers from google as used in the one above. However this time I did not do any erasing but experimented with the different layer blending options in photoshop, something I seem to have done a lot of throughout the project... I also thought that this might not work as well when printed on fabric as on screen it seemed to be very bright and I wanted my prints to be slightly more faded and less bold as it might make them less successful.

For this image I layered a photograph of leaves or clovers I took whilst on holiday in easter with a scanned painting of watercolour splashes seen bellow. I again used a layer blending option on photoshop to create this effect and I really liked how the white from the watercolour painting faded some of the photograph to create a quite melancholy image that contrasts to some of the more busy images that I have produced so far.