illustrations.

hellooo, I'm having a funny five minutes... I normally haaaate drawing but in the middle of the night last night I just wanted to do my illustrations! This is crazy compared to this time last year when I was spending 12+ hours working on an illustration that was never any good so i couldn't use it, and ending up with some computerised line drawing! So anyway, I thought I would post the results of my funny five minutes, two trial illustrations! I hope it will actually last longer than five mins, so i can actually finish my three illustrations for hand in! :) there should be lots more asos work coming up on here soon :) and while i'm at it here's a few bits i did for a Nicole Farhi internship application! 

Elaia

Hello! Here is the rambly post as promised, about our Westminster for ASOS Marketplace project, and my group, Elaia. We originally researched into the 1990's, working with a fashion buying team who advised us on trending era's on the Marketplace, from the 1990's we moved onto key events in this era, and found out about the oil spill disasters in this decade, there were hundreds! and whats not to like about a political/current affairs point to make along with hundreds of textile printing ideas! Our name elaia, is based around greek etymological roots to do with oil.
So we got to work and now we're four weeks in! Half way through, and pretty sleep-less. We were advised by our design tutors to include some clothing references into our research to help with silhouette ideas, so we started looking at workwear and performance wear, clothes that would be worn clearing up oil spills and that surrounding the topic of oil. The two main points that came from this for me, were boilersuits/jumpsuits/all in ones, and burqa style voluminous garments that would be worn in oil rich hot countries such as the middle east. From here we started to pinpoint our collections 'glue' and we're now heading for an all white collection, with iridescent oil type reflectiveness as a strong feature, along with pleats that came from oil rig type architectural references, and aspects of industrial and functional garment ideas, based on the workwear element. (when I say workwear, I mean the oil spill/manual labour type clothing, not as in an 'elle' feature on what you wear to the office this season...)

So here are the all important images! Our logo, moodboards, and a few of our ideas  :)

Please do check out facebook and tumblr pages for elaia! We have to market on social media sites as part of the project :) 

http://elaia-asos.tumblr.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Elaia/510534229003297

Pleats.

I'm going to do a rambly post soon explaining all about the ASOS project but for now, here are some samples I'm working on. :)

California Blue for Old Navy

helloooo! 6am, and I've just finished the first all nighter of being back at uni after our internships (it's been less than a week!) The first of maaaaannnnnyyyy to come I imagine! Today at 10am, we have to hand in our Old Navy Mini Project. (If you don't know already Old Navy are an american casual wear company, like the USA's Gap.) Old Navy are choosing someone from Westminster to go and do a paid internship with them in San Francisco in the summer, and it was made compulsory (a bit too recently) for us all to apply.

So here it is! The mini portfolio, mood boards, hand drawn range plan and flat drawings incorporating Old Navy logo's and classic tee and jeans designs, done very rapidly, all in a couple of days! I actually really enjoyed doing it!! I really got into the research imagery even though I'm really not a jeans and tee person (and now I will be falling asleep here, there and everywhere for a while cause there's no way I'll be napping during the next project!)

I named my mini project 'California Blue', going with an all american vibe, blue seas, sandy beaches, holidays, sunshine etc!

 :) 

January.

Hello, happy new year, bonne annee, blwyddyn newydd dda etc! So it is actually the 2nd of february now! Can't believe a month has gone past already but here's just a few words about January... its brought some quite big changes for me!

Firstly a resolution to eat my greens. Radical if you know me...!

Secondly the exit from university for 6 weeks to the big wide world of a fashion design internship...

Having interviewed back in november, I started my internship with Peter Jensen on January 3rd, having largely set all of my hopes that I'd lost during the time that I've been on my quite scary degree this day was quite a big one, I'd always looked to and waited for the internships as a time when I would know for sure if this industry was a wrong choice for me having hummed and harred a bit neurotically for the last couple of years. I was 99% sure however having got a place at Peter Jensen, a company  -
- who's aesthetic I loved,
- who's apparent ethics were much set apart from that of a standard brand due to involvement with companies such as People Tree and manufacture within England,
- and who's feet seemed to be a bit more realistically on the ground judging by the hours we were supposed to be working,
that it would prove not to be the wrong choice, and that this internship and the internship year to follow would be the making of my degree...
However I now realise that that was a pretty unreasonable weighting to put on this six weeks! I think all of us doing internships at the moment have experienced such a range of hugely different things that its pretty near impossible to tell how any one company works compared to another one just from their name or their size... some of us have been lucky and others not so and I think it would take actually a long time and many experiences of this to get to the bottom of where is a good place to be for each individual.
So the internship has provided me with a name for my CV (which I think is largely the whole point!) a lot of  cutting experience, a bit of toiling, quite a bit of running around and the odd bit of dyeing, tidying and making tea!

Here's a few pictures:

The line up boards

The flats

The Angela Bag

And a toile I made

So going back to changes, the third change of 2013 is a more or less 100% certain switch to study Knitwear at Winchester School of Art in September. Obviously this one's a big'un! I had more or less completely decided over the course of the last semester or two that fashion maybe isn't the place for me... so I've decided to just jump and move, I figure this will always be a positive thing in terms of skills, I'll get to pick up a lot of machine knitting know how which I'd otherwise have to pay for else where after I graduate... the other things like London town, the people here, and the opportunities for fashiony things I've dreamed of I'll obviously miss, but london I will hopefully see again, the people I know I will, and the fashiony dreams, half the time I don't think I want them! I think a little piece of me will always wish that that was what life had in store for me, but actually I've been there now, I do have a stunning University of Westminster tee shirt, (!) and I know 99% of the time, that its not!

Finally, the fourth change so far... a fairly large hair cut!

So here's to new starts.

p.s. they gave me a jumper hooray!

here's some research imagery for the current project, 2 days, 2 nights to go, already been up pretty much all week except for 4 hours! Roll on christmas....