Week 2

Colour Story

The goal of the second week was to do enough colour story and fabric research.

I had a lot of ideas for colour stories from my holiday research as it was all hand drawn content. Firstly, the colours that represent Babylon’s prosperity, they are all bright colours and they all stand out. So I put a lot of effort into adjusting the colour balance and in subsequent colour tests I will make changes as I feel appropriate. I have come up with a few colour combinations for the current study, such as red, brown and yellow for chaos, gold, silver and blue for prosperity, and green, blue and brown for lush vegetation. And I will continue to develop different colour combinations in subsequent studies.

I have also discovered my own problems in this colour research and my lack of control over colours. In class tutor also pointed out my problems with choosing between light and dark colours and how to balance this colour ratio. This is a weakness that I will have to work on in the future. I also came up with the idea that I will add this aspect of colour storytelling to my thinking in future research to ensure that it is developed further. I also can’t be constrained by this when thinking about this idea, so I still need to practice more.

Fabric Research

After the colour test, I have a basic prototype for my fabric research. In conjunction with my research on traditional clothing, I have also roughly categorised a few fabrics that I can use – organza, silk, cotton, gilded fabrics and sequins. These fabrics were a good way of expressing my initial ideas.

I also found a few new inspirations when sampling the fabrics, such as reflective fabrics, which could be pleated to give a better texture to the reliefs. I also found Linen to be a very good choice when it came to silk. Unlike silk, it has a rough surface but is also very smooth to the touch, and the matte finish enhances the garment. When looking for a fabric to replace the nail pieces in addition to the sequins, I found a fabric with a circular pattern embroidered on the front and back in black and gold, which makes for a great visual effect.

I was torn in choosing the feather material as I wasn’t sure what fabric would replicate that very deep shape very well. In the process I compared Stifner (a fabric used to make collar linings) with Refector (a reflective, smooth fabric) as they both have a strong shaping ability. The Refector was chosen because the smooth texture conveys the feeling of feathers very well and does not need to be folded very hard to leave marks.

To sum up, here are some of the things I learned from this fabric research I think I need to learn more about fabrics so that I can better target what I am looking for when I am looking for it and thus be more efficient. I have to say that this fabric selection did take much longer than I expected. There is also the issue of texture, I need to do a better job of incorporating what I researched, and this time there was also the issue of time, so I was very rushed and didn’t organise my time well.