Tutorial with Nick

Yesterday I went and spoke with Jill, expressing my worries regarding the completion of my project. I explained how I felt that my time at placement really ate into my project time, leaving me feeling rushed and panicked with the amount of work to do. Nick very kindly offered sit down and to help me with my AVA work. The following day we had the session where I was able to explain to Nick what I had in my head, and if there was any ways to achieve what I wanted. I was shown new methods such as, pasting into selected spaces and working within the actual motif. I also got Nick to look through some of my work so far, to see whether what I was actually doing was successful and if I should continue in the direction I was taking. I gained some really positive feedback which gave me more confidence within my work. I do feel I do not let others see my work enough, in order to gain their thoughts and advice. I was really glad I spoke up about my worries as I feel I gained a lot from a short mini tutorial, which allowed me to move forward with my work, with a much more positive mind-set. I then spent the rest of the day working on my motifs, experimenting, playing and putting into place the new skills and methods I had gained from my session. It also turned out to be a successful day of designing, exploring new possibilities and becoming more playful again.

talk about
-Small motifs being less effective and bigger ones being more mature
-how to save files and transfer files to print

Background prep

Below are stitched fabrics which I prepared ready to print onto. My plan is to use Magic touch and possibly sublimation printing to tranfer my digital motif and repeat designs onto the backgrounds. I wanted to experiment with different materials and have used two sample pieces from my time at Trident Cars to work onto.

Development of prints

Here I had my first digital collection of prints. I was happy with my development from my initial drawings, however I did feel they were missing that fun, playful aspect of my drawings. I had managed to remove the child-like qualities in my drawings and some of things I loved most about my work.  

I decided to get other peoples opinions and advice on where to go next with my designs. I questioned the size of the motifs, the colours used in the prints, combinations, the composition, repeat layout and any advice they had to move forward with. Although I only made a few notes on the page below, I has a good few discussions with my peers and my flatmates, which I think really helped in the development of my work. 

Some of the points made were;

• The repeats looked very child-friendly-very appropriate for a children bedroom 
• Larger Motifs would work better and show off more of the organic qualities to my drawings 
• 5 spot repeat?
• Filling the in the entire space of the paper and not leaving gaps in between motifs

Colour and Context inspiration

https://uk.pinterest.com/charlovestea/ba6-colour-and-industry-inspiration/

Inspiring lecture

Our most recent lecture was taken by Signe Rand, an incredibly skilled weaver. Considering I am not a weaver, I found the lecture really fascinating and Signe so inspiring. She spoke about her industry experiences and her very impressive CV. One key client who really stuck out in my mind was Alexander McQueen- (no biggy). She discussed her collaborations with other design students and how versatile you have to be in order to learn, develop and push yourself. Signe's lecture was very visually exciting, full of beautiful big photos making it more enticing. I really appreciated that she discussed her journey after Graduating, her time studying it RCA and what she produced in her work. As a student looking up to emerging designers, I really take advantage of their advice and knowledge regarding their work and there experiences.  

Bad day.

So today has been one big problem after another. I spent the day creating possible final designs using AVA.  The designing was going well and I was happy with my progress. I was using sacnned drawings from my sketchbook, as well as drawings created straight onto photoshop. I liked the variation between the methods and was surprised how similar they looked once put into repeat. So after many hours of designing and manipulating my motifs, I went to save the files, to then open them in my user account. The problem was my files were sooo big, simply due to the amount of information on each one. The files would not save at all. I started to panic after spending a long time working on them. I couldn't save them to my memory stick and was struggling to get why it wouldn't save. I asked at the desk a way around the saving and was told to save them in a shared space on the NUA database. Once on there I would be able to access them and convert them back to a PDF and work on them further. I saved my work to this database space, praying they would work. Long story short and they did not load. The ones that did load took nearly 30 mins to do so. This was a big problem and something I hadn't  intended to happen, after numerous successes using AVA.  I was feeling very tired and frustrated and decided to seek help to try and retrieve my work. It turns out I had created huge scale designs, which had been the cause to my very stressful saving and converting process.  I learnt that photoshop and AVA are very different and that you cannot alter the size of the file in the same way. I had created 8×8 repeats with my original motif already being A4. I now know I need to be more careful with the size and scale of the work I produce on AVA.  I need to be more aware of the DPI count and the data size of my documents. In future I will seek reassurance of measurements for my AVA work, to ensure I do not do the same again. This problem was due to lack of AVA knowledge although I felt fairly confident with the software.

In the end, with help from a very helpful technician I slowly managed to transfer my work on a memory stick, open on another faster computer and reduce size on photoshop. This was a very stressful and long process however, I have learnt from this error and will be more aware of it in the future.

Motif development