Benefits and challenges of working in a group? Benefits-  Working in a group allows a collaboration of ideas, expanding your initial thoughts into larger and more interesting concepts. Challenges- working as a group can sometimes lead to depending on others support and ideas. 

How has your response to the project brief developed? Over the time of this project I feel my visual representation of my ideas have become more and more clear throughout my sketchbook, creating a clear flow throughout my work. Starting off with brainstorming within a group to then narrowing my ideas down to just one concept on my own really challenged yet provoked my individual thinking. The visual side to this project brief has evolved throughout the pages, becoming more intimate and detailed, picking apart the idea slowly, finding different challenges to find my way around when thinking of it as a physical, real, thing. Finding ways to jump from just an idea to making a physical model from sketches was difficult yet again, provoking. Having so little material to create this three dimensional model, the concept of it become even more fascinating to me, being able to find a way around the lack of material to create a three dimensional representation of my sketches was exciting. 

How was your experience of displaying your work in progress? - Displaying my work was daunting at first but I quickly warmed up to the idea after finding out how open people were to sharing their process and ideas. I found it exciting how everybody was so interested in what others had to share. Having to write things about others work I found more of a challenge.. this is definitely an area I have to work on improving. 

Did you find the post it feedback useful? - This technique I found very helpful. In some ways I felt it was almost like the whole room was collaborating on ideas and each others work and this was super cool to me! The concept that your fellow students can talk about your ideas and try and think of ways to improve them shows support and dedication to your fellow colleagues. 

What did you learn today? - The importance of collaborating but also the importance of then using that information to create an idea on your own. Finding ways around issues like: lack of materials to create a three dimensional model and having to sketch your ideas super quickly in different styles, yet using clear visualisation to bring forward your idea. 

Contextual practice is important as it helps you to process your thoughts in different types of forms. It opens up your imagination and allows you to create things you might not think you would. It helps you breach out into different strengths you might not know you had. Today we had our first Contextual Practice session, we were put into groups and then given a quote, we were told to think about the quote and consider the meaning behind it. At first I was a little confused but after brainstorming ideas with my table I realised that this was a great way to open up my mind to the more literate side of creativity. We were then told to turn our ideas into a small section of writing. Our table was given the quote: 'A wold without sound' after recoding what I had written down, I realised that this was a very cleaver way to get our thoughts running wild. My piece was about how the world would be, how it would change if we lost the art of sound, it brought out creativities that I didn't know I had. 

Today we were told to do a presentation of our work from this weeks brief, this was in order to conclude the Ideas project, I decided to make a three dimensional model for my piece, I feel, as drawing isn't my strongest area I find it much easier to communicate my ideas through a physical example of what I was thinking. The model I created wasn't as strong as I wished, but I was able to take some images of it that I felt worked quite well. The concept for my idea I thought was quite strong as at the beginning of the brief I wasn't happy with many of my outcomes. My peers seemed to like my idea, they found it very interesting, yet my sketchbook was a little hard for even myself to work out! What I have learnt from this experience is too try and create/visualise my ideas in a more simplistic way, have more white space around my concepts so that the flow throughout my work is easier to follow. 

Today I tried screen printing for the first time, the process was slightly stressful but I found it interesting how intricate and detailed you have to be for the image to come out the way you want it. When we were first given our letters, I was a little stuck with what I could turn mine into (I got given the letter A) but then I started to try and look at it as a shape and not a letter, I then came up with the idea of the Eiffel Tower but as there are so many small details to it, that wouldn't have been possible to print with red ink onto black. So I then came up with the idea of it becoming a building in a skyline. I then decided to add smoke coming out of chimneys from the buildings, representing the pollution factories create. I was very pleased with my result but felt I could have created the effect of more buildings being in the image a little better. We were then given the task to create a stop motion movie, this I found way more challenging. I found cutting out all the different sizes and pieces to create the movie a little slow, but I tried and i'm okay with how the finished product come out, I feel it has a nice vibe to it. Overall I found today pretty exciting! I'm really enjoying trying  out so many different forms of art. 

Have you changed your perception of what textiles is? -In a way.. I saw textiles as a more material based subject, not so drawing based, but the brief we were given today was really fascinating, I really enjoyed the continuous line drawing. The fact that we tried so many different ways of drawing was really good for me, I find it difficult at times to be confident with my pen on paper so what we did today was  perfect. I learnt to be less precious with my sketches, just getting my ideas down onto paper. I really enjoyed then turning my sketches into fabric designs by projecting our images onto our clothes or bits of fabric. Experimenting with laying and adding other images to create more dense visuals was super interesting and extremely fun. This is definitely something I want to do more of. 

Writing out your ideas is another form of visualising them. Its another way to get your ideas down but in another format. This can be very useful sometimes as seeing things in different lights can get you to have different opinions or views on the same subject, it opens up another form of creativity and helps broaden your perspective. Writing your stream of conscious down can get you to unravel thoughts in your head that you didn't know were there. It enables you to be more free with your ideas, basically setting your conscious free. It's also interesting to find out what you actually think about something when you don't think about it too much, you just let it happen. In our day to day routines there are many things we see, pass, have contact with that are connected to certain associations, for example traffic lights, we associate the colour red to stop and the colour green to go. Colours, vibes, atmospheres can automatically change what someone thinks of something. As humans we've learnt how to associate certain things with other things, for example seeing an advert with light pastel colours, with a young white female standing in the middle of it with a massive smile on her face will be seen differently to an advert advertising the energy drink 'monster' for example, using darker more harsh tones to attracted a completely different audience. The way in which we project our selfs will differ with different types of clothing, the colours we wear, the materials our clothes are made from, every type of style will then be associated to the type of person you are. 

My perception of what fine art is has definitely changed since starting this brief. Today we were told to erase parts of an image or add to an image. I created a two page spread of images related to the theme of clothing. On the left there is an image of vintage washing machines and on the right an image of a Burberry fashion show. With these two images I decided to somehow take away parts of both images and somehow merge the two visuals together. In the middle of the two photographs I constructed a piece of it's own with the cutouts from the photographs. On the next page I then took another image and erased parts of it but placed the cut outs on the page next to the image in the place they would have been if I didn’t remove them. These two pages I absolutely love because the white space really frames the pieces and almost acts like its own gallery space. 

I then decided to work on top of CDs, creating a collage from a fashion advertisement from Prada. I wanted to create a piece in which I looked like this could have been the actual image on top of the CD. I liked the idea of merging fashion and music into one. 

 Today I enjoyed the aspect of graphic behaviour in my work. 

Wear It- Today we sketched ideas for jewellery, fashion accessories and footwear. We created jewellery from the sketches we drew and used basic materials such as gold wire to express our ideas into visuals and physical pieces. This task was interesting to me as creating a physical piece of jewellery that had specific design elements to it with such limited materials was quite challenging. 

Do Undo Redo - Today we experimented with fashion communication and the styling aspect within fashion communication. We experimented with different materials and were given four words to use to then complete four looks - 'Light', 'Dark', 'Hybrid', 'Colour' and "Pattern'.  This has been my favourite workshop so far, I love the creativity within using materials and creating any shape on the body that you want. Experimenting with colours and how shapes fit together was extremely exciting for me. I loved how broad the brief was, you could create anything you wanted as long as it was on the body. I loved the whole process, the styling, finding a backdrop, photographing the looks, giving the images moods and atmospheres with different angles and lighting. My favourite part was the styling aspect, picking different materials and putting them together, creating one whole look from lots of different pieces, working with and creating different shapes onto the body was definitely the highlight to the course so far.  

Your surroundings- Today we worked with structural shapes and turned them into garments. We were told to draw a series of observational drawings and then pick aspects of the images that we thought were interesting and then turn into shapes we can transfer onto the body. 

Today we did a fashion illustration workshop called 'Your interpretation' we experimented with a wide range of skills that you can you when it comes to illustration work. I found this workshop very helpful as it taught me to not be so precious when it comes to my illustration work. We were taught how to use colour blocking within our illustration which I found interesting. My favourite part of this workshop was creating our own collage materials from observation drawings of existing materials- we were told to pick two materials that we enjoyed, photograph them and then draw them. I loved this as I felt it really added our own style into our collage illustrations. I also really enjoyed creating a life sized illustration, using a real body of someone in our class and added details like string or tape to outline their body, this was intriguing to me because it made me see fashion illustration in a completely new way. I also enjoyed this aspect to the workshop as it was very hands on, you got physically involved with the illustration adding details to where you think needed it. With this work we were first told to white down a series of words that we thought related to our sketchbook illustrations, we then picked a selected few and had to use these words to then create the life sized illustration, this gave the concept structure and something to work towards.