Natural Framework

Natural Framework, a breeze with nature, a walk in the park. 

As an initial starting point to the brief, we took a trip the World Museum in Liverpool. Here I created themed catogorised pages of primary and secondary drawings, all exploring the different elements of nature.

Bees, lady birds and beetles.

Fruit! What a wonderful creation, I mean it grows on trees and plants. What a wonderful aspect of natures creations.

Vegetables! Another amazing creation, grown fresh in the ground, nutured and transported right to our local shops, the goodness of nature! Peppers, carrots, broccoli and tomatoes!

An overview of my fruit drawings. I decided to vary my media to show different styles of creating explorative effects! I've used oil pastel, acrylic paint, water colour, fine liner and water to add shape, detail form and tone to my drawings.

Beautiful butterflies. One aspect that really fascinated me in the World Museum is a large display of butterflies in a glass frame. All different sizes and shapes, species and colours! A really transforming and captivated dispersion of the beauty of butterflies.

An iconic object of nature, flowers! One of my favourites in particular, tulips. I decided to use a soft tone of pencil to really capture the light, tone and shadow.

Fish and sea life! Almost another world under the sea, a place that is always an adventure, a home of sea horses, sea weed, fish, whales and star fish.

Shells, fossils and bones, the remains of what was before human life on earth. Really something to investigate and treasure forever. An adventure waiting for be discovered, a hidden story, a concealed secret. I decided a fine liner and water was the best type of media to use for this theme of drawings, it's an old washed vintage look, to encourage the fact that these are old findings of architecture.

The beauty of what spiders can produce? Something we should really be thankful for.

The beauty and art of the creativity of a spiders web!

Nadia Flower

Nadia Flower, a beautiful feminine designer and illustrator. Maintaining a common theme of pink, female mannequins, pretty dresses and pastel colours, one of the reasons as to why I chose her as an inspiration. 

Alison Willoughby

Alison Willoughby, an aspiring skirt textile designer. As my final outcome was a chosen skirt displaying the influences of Natural framework, Alison Willoughby is a perfect example of inspiration for creating a skirt. More commonly known as ' skirt girl ' she created beautiful handmade skirts and t shirts with iconic and original creative design, hand attached paper hats and play house plastic balls. Her techniques and use of colour and design is what attracted me towards her work in the first place.

Angie Lewin

Angie Lewin, a more vintage illustrator of flowers and natural garden design. As the project is all about natural framework, I believed Angie's work would be a perfect inspiration as her designs mainly consist of flowers and all things you'd find in a garden. Accompanied with a female touch and beautiful colours, over layering of design, all of which are an aspect  to develop and experiment with during sampling and also the final outcome!

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic artist with a 3D touch to nature. Stefan's work is completely fascinating, it's out of sketchbooks, out of a studio and out in NATURE. Outdoors in the woods, in the garden anywhere that's natural and surrounded of wonderful natural creations. He displays the use of typography and single use words or phrases, portrayed within the creative advantages of nature. For example using leaves and the tree branches to cleverly spell the word good.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, a fine artist with a strong body of illustration and cartoon like design. Block colour and beautiful abstract shape to create the more of original pieces. 

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse, another fine artist who created colourful images of abstract shapes and block colour, with the influential technique of lino prints. A technique as to which I could use and experiment with!

An aztec feather bookmark tag I created for my sketchbook, representative of a birds feather, an object of nature!

Tweet tweet.

Prior to my final piece, I created small a5 compositions of potential ideas that could go towards my final piece. I used illustrations in different media's and compositions, with the influence of artist reference and typography to advertise the World Museum. 

Another composition created with coloured pencil, influenced by Angie Lewin and Nadia flowers use of composition, colour and design. I'd also say my strongest body of design to display the World Museum. It has the the biggest connection to artist influence and my thought process.

Fine art

In all honest I'm not the worlds best fine artist. But however, every technique is out there to experiment with. From my artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, they're exploration into etchings and lino prints is an aspect I must experiement with. So taken from there influence and the style of etchings/lino prints, I created a series of 4 compositions, influenced by artist and my primary drawings. These are possible candidates for my final prints.

I would also be screenprinting with a stencil. So influenced by primary research and my influences, I created 4 compositions of natural form related designs. I used varied media to experiment, then I selected my favourite and most successful and effective composition.

I decided to use my most successful drawing of a series of 3 butterflies, ascending in size order. This would be a stencil that I would then use to print with. For the best and most bold effect that I wanted, I used acrylic paint, as it's creamy consistency gives this bright and vibrant finish.

This is my stencil. Ironically when I stuck this into my sketcbook and closed it, some of the ink transferred into a print on the opposite page as shown in the photo below.

Pretty Robert Raucshenberg that really?

(Accidently on purpose).

Graphics

For our final outcome in Graphics, we were to experiment with typography, images and advertisement of the World Museum. From this I created 4 compositional designs that are natural form related and clearly advertise the museum with effective reactions.

Influenced by Stefan Sagmeister, I decided to play with nature and really get outdoors.

I wrote typography onto leaves, wrote onto bananas, experimented with butterflies and various camera angles.

Although they didn't go towards my final outcomes, I still enjoyed experimenting and really getting to grips with nature and outdoor life for what it really is.

In the end I chose my final 4 x a5 postcard advertisements and displayed as shown. I used various medias, compositions, colours, typography and imagery.

This butterflies composition has to be my favourite though. It's my most successful and effective postcard.

                                                                  The design process

The design process of distributing thoughts, ideas and experimenting onto paper. Prior to making any final piece of sampling, large a2 design sheets are put into use. I created different drawings onto mannequins of varied compositions, patterns, and colours of potential skirt ideas. It allows me to see my thought process onto paper, as a visual individual this is very beneficial.

Onto the sampling! Here is a basic a line skater skirt made from calico, with my own creation of buterflies printed onto acetate which I then arranged onto the skirt as a dispersion in a diagonal downwards route. As influenced from the display in the World Museum and also my design sheet. My reasons for attaching something 3D onto something 2D is influenced from my artist and skirt maker; Alison Willoughby.

I took a likliness to the fish I drew and recorded in my sketchbook. The clown fish in particular was my favourite, so I decided to transfer this onto acetate and turn it into a screen print. Which I have then printed and sewn onto fabrics, trapped into plastic and then machine stitched over the top with varied colours and styles of stitching. These are simple yet effective quick samples. 

I found a rather satisfying approach towards collecting found materials and piecing them together. Accompanied with some coloured threads, stitching and plastic, and I had created a range of composed patterns and layering, which I then experimented with in my next sample.

My favourite and most successful and representative sample. This is the sample that contributed to the front of my final piece. It's a layering of found fabrics, machine stitched in single strips with lengths of thread and different styles of effective stitches, some trapped in plastic, which are all then folded up and arranged together layered up to gain this colourful, experimentive frilly sample effect.

This is my final piece! :)

The front of the skirt. An original a line skater skirt shape, with my favourite use of layered fabrics and stitching to create the frilly layered effect. I accompanied this by adding screen prints of my designs on the 2 sides to add a different style. The middle section is more of a 3D aspect, so I maintained the 2 sides to a more flat surface.

The backs of my skirt, I took an liking to tie dye, so I experimented with purple and pinks to create this very abstract background. I then created another layer to influence form by adding some of my screen prints in an accompanying colours.

There's something fishy going on around here.