PPD TERM 1

SDS research

For sourcing inspiration, I have been to National Portrait Gallery and “Strange Clay” exhibition. During the trip I have done some sketches on the sculptures that I found interesting. As the ceramic squid sculpture done by David Zink Yi has attracted me so much, I further did an artist research on him, which I realised that the reason why there was some black ink and syrup mixture surrounding his work was to prevent audience stepping on his work, which was originally not belonging his part of the artwork. This led me to design a pair of footwear that can prevent being stepped, due to my home culture— Hong Kong has a high population density and we always got stepped on the street due to the crowds. Also, Zink Yi’s obsession with giant sea creatures has inspired me to bring enlarged sea urchin into my design, because this is the most undesirable sea creatures that people are not prefer to get in touch with. I started to work on my design by making many sharp stripes using newspaper and masking tape, then attaching them on a pair of heels, and spray-painted them in black, so as to form the sense of dark marine vibe.

Marketing 1

The reason why I was motivated by Balenciaga is that I have always been obsessed with its fashion aesthetics, and I wish to work for Balenciaga in the future, so I aim to investigate the business structure and strategies about the brand by doing research and analysis in order to understand their goals and prospects.

I really looking forward to have the knowledge of the brand history as it is always fascinating to see how a luxury brand can build up its own recognisable style and survive under huge competition in fashion industry.

As writing and price researching don’t really interest me comparing to other aspects, I will lose patience while documenting, and the fact that I will be less motivated and affected my time management. So I have to prioritise the tasks related to these areas to make sure I can manage to achieve all the tasks on time.

Marketing 2

In order to obtain a better time management, for myself, I always write down every tasks that I need to do on paper first, then I will categorised them according to their difficulties, which I will manage to do the most difficult ones for start, as a result I can seek for help at earlier time and not leaving everything unfinished at the last moment.

However, I will procrastinating my tasks as I seldom will be unmotivated due to lack of interest for the difficult parts, and also I need extra time and effort to complete them. Therefore sometimes I will comparatively have less time to focus on other perspectives that I enjoy more.

Generally, I have a very smooth working flow. For instance, I have to identify the market level of a brand during the range plan task, and I didn’t hesitate much and I found it fun to work on, so I completed the task very quickly.

Design1

I believe UAL’s design based course has provided a relatively tolerable and flexible learning environment for me to actually explore innovative and futuristic ideas, which I have no limitations on developing my artwork. Besides, UAL has gathered the top students with their individual fashion sense which I am able to learn from the peers and improve myself. Another key element to make UAL’s course different is that the tutors have provided adequate amount of advice and teaching with passion which I will get more passionate about my study, and I become bolder of presenting who I am and what I am obsessed with in my work, and in a more sophisticated way. From this session I have learnt to draw, collage and transforming the image by zooming in and out of some photos I took from primary research to create random shapes, then I trace the interesting part of the pattern using tracing paper, and draw doodles onto it and try to imagine it as a piece of garment. By developing further, I have repeatedly trace and flip a same pattern to make a brand new symmetrical pattern. This is taught by my tutor and I found it useful and will use this skill in my future project. The part I found it difficult is that I was hard to add some details into the shape as I require much imagination and I haven’t try to design a clothing like this before.

Design2

In this session I have further developed my previous work from design 1 by adding colours onto the designed patterns using materials like oil pastel, water colour and paint in several colour themes which I have extracted from my photos from primary research and exhibitions, and tried to work out what is the best theme to fit the pattern. During the trials, I will also look at the compatibility of the colour used, for example I will prefer to use more blue on the coat and work out the best colour proportion for the design. I found this session more challenging then designing a silhouette for a clothing, because sometimes the colour combination will be very odd and messy, or very simple and dull, which I have to control the proportion really well. To overcome, I have looked into some fashion shows on Vogue and try to learn how the designers play with the colours, and again practice makes perfect, I have experiences plenty of trials to get the patterns coloured and finally produce some work that I was satisfied of.

Visual study1

This lesson is about drawing the proportion of human figures, and I seldom used to draw them proportionally and I prefer my drawings to be freestyle and in weird shapes, so I was less familiar with the skills. I was failed draw the proportion several times, and when my tutor walked past and checked on my work, she told me to sketch some outlines first to make an approximate structure, then further shape it into a human figure. After that I realised that practice makes perfect, and I really understand how it works really quickly. Even after school I tried to ask my peers to stand and pose for me to do some life drawings, and I found it I have improved in some ways, and for my others SDS work I was allow to speed up my sketching processes, for example sketching coloured fashion illustrations in my Design two work.

Visual study2

This was a very memorable and exciting lesson, as my class needed to draw the footwear outcome produced by our classmates. I have utilised some lines with different thickness on my drawing which made it very lively and funky. Then I cut out my footwear sketch and make collages on models, then I further re-design them with paints and pens. This requires a lot of creativity and less of drawing skills which made me excited about. Also, everyone drew their shoes in different angles and perspectives, and also we have chosen different types of models, so the collages of me and classmates are very varied and amusing. I think my difficulty in this task is the usage of colours, which I required more time to think about the colour combination. Also, not every models photos’ heads can fit my sketch so I have to cut them out many times. However, my strength is being creative while collaging, which I always have the confidence to create eccentric outcomes.

Media 1

From this video filming task, I have to make a short film about my footwear outcome. During this task, my strength is to play with the video filters and I like to do experiments with different effects such as darkening and turning the video negative, so as to convey the background story that I was trying to express for the shoes, and suggest a dark and powerful theme. The weakness in this task is to add annotations into the video, because I have difficulties on choosing the suitable font style as the fonts I have chosen at start were a bit strange and unmatched. However, to overcome my difficulty, I tried to adjust the positions where the fonts should locate, as well as the sizes, so the outcome has improved from that. I am very satisfied with my work, as the video has expressed the weird chic street style of me.

Media 2

I have done interviews with a classmate next to me, and we have discussed the layout and style of the two page of magazine. I believe that my strength is that I was very close to my classmate, so we have better communication about deciding the topics on making the pages—Why is she obsessed with Hello Kitty. It was a very exotic topic to talk about is because Hello Kitty’s target audience is teenager rather than adult, so I seldom heard of people appreciating Hello Kitty, which made it an interesting element to explore about through my task. Also, the moment I have decided on exploring this topic, I immediately had so much brainstorms in my mind, which made me very exciting and looking forward to complete my task. The difficulty in this task is that the alignment of the texts was very hard because there was too much content and I have to make them easy to read but also aesthetic at the same time.

Creative suit 1

From this session, I had a better understanding about digital art and adobe software, realising that art is not only limited in reality and there is so much more that I can work with computation art. Although I have only learnt to use photoshop in lesson, I wish to explore the rest of the softwares such as Indesign. During the lesson, I have learnt to elongate a photo using photoshop. And I have tried some variations, example elongate the photos diagonally. As I am not computation skills are comparatively weak, so my working flow is not very smooth and hard to finish at a limited period of time. For a better performance, I will try to practice using different tools within the software outside school, so next time I can ask directly ask my tutor for advice of effects and layout that I want to make, and I will understand more easily.

Creative suit 2

There was more challenges experienced during this lesson. During class, I continuously getting confused about the task and have to seek help from my tutors, plus I accidentally deleted the tool bar which I again needed help from my tutors, which results in a bad time management as I have wasted so much time on fixing the functions on the software, although I have already asked around in class. To improve, I will pay extra attention to what the tutor has mentioned and jot down the key points of the task. I comparatively had less interest on the task assigned today, as I don’t like to work with mouse and keyboards, and it creates pressure on me to keep up with the flow. However, it was a great experience to understand how photo editing works on photoshop, and I will keep on practicing until I get very familiar with the procedures and functions on the software.

Feedback

In this lesson, I have read the feedbacks I have received from my peers and tutors. From what they have written, I was allowed to understand my strength and weakness more. After that, I reviewed all the works that I have done up til now, and I understood the reason why the tutors commented on those work that were needed to improve. For instance, for the research aspect, I realised that my research were still lack of content, which I could have explored more in detail. Also, I was absent for my presentation due to sickness, so I was not able to receive any marks on that. However, I still completed my presentation. As the teacher commented on my presentation, saying that I should develop more on mood board and styling to show relevance to creative direction. To improve, I will take account to make mood boards for my photoshoots in order to present my concepts clearly in the future. On the other hand, I have discovered my strength which is experimentation and development. When I looked into my work, it was obvious that I have put more effort into those aspects. For example, I will plan everything at first and provide evidences of everything that I have made throughout the tasks. For comments provided by my peers, it was mentioned that they found my accessories made inspired by Shoreditch very interesting, and my texts and photos presented are very organised. I was very glad to hear that, because appreciation from different people have always been my motivation for being bold to develop my own style while studying this course. However, my peers also suggest me to express my photos with different ways, which I will try to work this out by putting more efforts on collaging photos for my later projects.