Investigations

Drawings that I produced influenced by Ashley Goldberg weren't successful and reflective enough of the Whitworth and what I aspired to achieve. Therefore I decided to scan these images into Photoshop and colour match my colour palettes to the compositional drawings. However, these drawings weren't vibrant enough so I decided to develop on technique - changing the medium used to draw with. 

David Hockeny was the main influence for this. I allowed myself to research into the ever changing medium within his work. Starting off using acrylic, oil paints and gouache, and developing into the modern day using an 'app' on his iphone called "Brushes". Hockey uses the app to paint landscape art using colours that he notices directly (even though this might not be the exact colour), he paints as he first visions it, and this was a massive help to me as it enabled me to start to visualise different colours in the initial photographs and create developed drawings using more vibrant colours - this reflected my Whitworth target audience more effectively.
These drawings were taken from the "outside, inside" theme, capturing the outside colours of my (tree) photographs, with the inside patterns. 

 

After producing these drawings I decided after seeing students work from 3D and their miquette's in the peer review, that it was time for me to understand my product more by concentrating on the construction of it. In particular how easy it is to make (for production purposes).

The bird (keyring) will be digitally printed, and the outline will be satin stitched using the domestic Bernina. This is to ensure that every bird is the same until the construction process where it will be hand sewn by the consumer to allow each bird to be unique, making it more personal.

Sampling started with digitally printing various drawings onto 100% white cotton.

The first set of samples that I produced were embroidered onto using the Cornelly, as I found that the continuous movement of the machine and thread would allow me to draw the spiral patterns on the inside of a tree. The chain stitch the Cornelly machine produces vaguely represents that the Whitworth gallery links the various communities around the area together. 

After producing these samples I found it hard to visualise them as a 3D product, so I made a window frame of the exact template measurements to focus on the important parts of the samples.

I decided to produce further prints after sampling various techniques onto my inital developed drawings, as the embroidery wasn't effective enough.
I haven’t been completely happy with previous drawings and I came to the conclusion that when the photographs are layered with the drawings, they are very strong and distract from the main focus in samples. Therefore I have experimented with the opacity of my photographs, layering them with these developed drawings and stitching into them using various carefully considered techniques. I started changing the opacity of drawings and pixelating them on Photoshop allowed me to embroider easier as I could focus on techniques better.