Easter Holidays

     Over the Easter holidays I wanted to focus my time on drawing, sample ideas and garment designs. I started off with the drawing element as I feel that it has been lacking in the past few weeks. I began with digital drawing, using motifs from early on in my research that I had yet to use. Since all the motifs are from areas of Nigeria, the digital designs I made looked a lot like Nigerian textiles when combined with our new colour scheme which is more vivid. It is good to see clearly that when all research is combined into designing, the outcome is clearly showing where our ideas have come from and representing them in our work. In terms of physical drawings, I decided to start with watercolours; focusing on the patterns of the military wear garments we have photographed. After painting those out in our colour scheme I picked out rectangular shapes to overlap. I think they could be really helpful when developing my sample ideas for weaving so hope to do more of this throughout the project.

                After trying to create sample ideas from my drawings, I found that none of them looked particularly nice or represented my work/ research very well. I found it really difficult to try and create anything since everything looks slightly different once woven anyway. I decided that it would be best to wait until I had access to my loom again so that I could test some ideas before designing. However, I did manage to test colours that would work well with my warp and tried various proportions of them to see which looked best.

                When starting to design garments I was a bit unsure of where to start. I therefore made a mood board of military wear and school uniforms to see what elements of our research I could pick out to start designing. I noticed a lot of shirts and skirts so decided to design 10 each of those alongside 5 head scarves. I think the headscarves are crucial to our designing alongside maybe hoods as a way to expand. I also think we may have to consider modesty with a lot of the designs and how much the body is covering different areas.