For our F.M.P in the first year the theme of the project was culture so I started off looking at a variety of different cultures; British, Japanese, African, Greek, Chinese etc...
Despite being British when it came to thinking of things that were typically British and contributed to our culture I was fresh out of ideas, so as a starting point I looked at London as it is the Capital of England. I looked at Big Ben, The Gherkin, red post boxes and telephone boxes. This image is of a pastel study that I did of the Gherkin based on an image that I had taken on a previous trip to London. I have included this as it is one of my favourite studies that I did on British Culture in this project.
I had pretty much made my mind up straight away that the culture I was going to push forward to produce my final outcome was going to be British, and as the outcome I was working towards was going to be a fashion garment I felt looking at clothes was essential for me, but instead of looking at clothes from this era I took a step back in time and looked at the Victorian Era of Britain and the clothes they wore.
Along side looking at Victorian clothing I also looked at Georgian clothing as in the Georgian Era of Britain they way in which people dressed was how they established themselves and into which class they were divided as back in those days there was a very clear hierarchy in Britain.
My idea for my final outcome soon came flying into my head which was to combine a modern day item of clothing but to corporate an olden day style into it, I just needed to decide between Georgian and Victorian. I chose Victorian and the style in which I looked at was going to be the big puffy sleeves that was incorporated into the majority of the garments they wore.
With my idea finalised I needed a pattern for my final garment so that it didn't look plain and boring. Instead of choosing a pattern related to British culture I chose to look at the scales of a chinese dragon and incorporate these into it, but before applying it to my outcome I needed to experiment and find a colour scheme and if it would actually work.
These are two other studies that I did as part of my primary research, on the left is a painting I did of an African painting and of the right was a line drawing done in fine liner of a Japanese anime eye. I like both of these studies but as a whole the work that I had done for the remainder of my primary research concerning these cultures wasn't as strong as my other work so I resolved to not push them any further.
This is my favourite piece of work by the main artist that I researched; Charles Frederick Worth. I felt that this piece really captured what I was aiming to achieve in my final outcome.
Now I knew where I was heading with this project it was time to experiment in colour for the pattern that I would be using, I had already decided to imitate the dragon scale pattern so now it was just a case of what colours I was going to use. I experimented in a variety of different colours and in the end I chose the black lining with the brown as I was already going to be dying the shirt brown as I felt it was a more Victorian styled colour this fitted in nicely and added consistency to my final outcome.
Now I had to mock up the sleeve, to create the puffed up effect I had a choice of either pleating the sleeve or gathering, whilst pleating the sleeve was a lot neater it didn't provide the effect I was looking for. Gathering was a lot more successful for creating a greater puffed up effect so I went with gathering. The above images are scanned images directly from my sketchbook.
It was decided that I would also need to re-do the buttons so I got a small piece of silk a button clasp and did a smaller print of the dragon scale pattern so the buttons would also tie in with the polo shirt.
This is an image of my friend Bex again modelling my final outcome, I was really please with it at the end and how it turned out but looking back I could've also dyed the sleeves to match the same colour as the polo shirt and then just printed the black lining over it. Other than this small criticism this was my favourite project so far.
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