Reflective Journal- Week 1

To start the week off we have been set a group task to create a design for a repeat print length. The first task we were set was to use a piece of A2 white paper then to draw an object that we'd brought in, once we'd drawn the object we then passed round the piece of paper, drawing another object without taking the pen off the paper, then passing it around again to draw an object on a large scale and lastly to fill in the 'negative space' on the page, (the empty, white space). This task was interesting to see the way each member of the group approached the task and how it looked at the end, trying out these different techniques of drawing in a short period of time was very experimental and interesting.

Moreover, this gave us an idea of how our actual design would eventually look like, but in a rough, sketchy way. Our group quickly decided on an initial idea of plants and birds, after looking at previous year's repeat prints we found that they all had a block colour background, we then decided we wanted to be slightly different and more bold and try out a striped background, we experimented with this in our sketchbooks by layering our drawings on top of a striped background.

My main role within this project was to draw some of the plants that will feature in the final design, creates textures and look at colour and composition. I am not extremely confident with drawing detailed objects, or in this case birds/animals, therefore my other group members took the role of this job, working in a team has been a new thing for me since working individually in year 1, I am enjoying working as a team and putting my design ideas with other peoples. I've made several mood boards experimenting with colour ways and ideas of colour swatches for our work, also researching colour trends for spring/summer 2019, using Pantone and WGSN for colour inspiration, this gave me and my group insight into upcoming colour trends to experiment with.

Each member of our group scanned in our drawings, my main role in this was to use my skills of illustrator and 'image trace' some of the images to give them a bolder, clearer outline, change the scale, rotation and reflection to experiment with composition. This enabled us to experiment with image composition in a quick way, once we had done that we stuck all of our drawings down, choosing the composition, we then made the cut through which is one of the last steps toward tracing out our design.

Using photoshop, we scanned in our final design so we could change the colour of the background and certain drawings within our design, this enabled us to see how the colours would roughly look on our design. This was only a rough idea as when we print onto the fabric with our chosen colours, these could mix and make a new colour.

Overall from this week I have been able to refresh myself with working with photoshop and illustrator, been introduced to working in a group as a collaboration of ideas from different people and attempting to draw out detailed images and designs.

Repeat Design

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