Category: March – April

Hi everyone,

This week is my last official week on placement with Bottle Blonde as my deadline is today, although I shall still be working at Bottle Blonde for another 2 weeks before I leave. My entire industry year has been an eye opening experience. I’ve learnt so much about how the industry works, skills that I’ll be forever grateful for in my final year and built upon skills I’ve learnt throughout my first 2 years of university. Reflecting back over my year I personally feel I have grown as a person and a designer. I have more direction and determination in my life and I have more ideas about what I would like to do for my final major project. I have learnt how to work better in a team, how to present my ideas and final products better as well as developed how I design. 

During my final official week I have been designing more packaging for Bottle Blonde. My main focus for the week has been on how to develop our current packaging further to make it more instagramable which would increase our sales. The more extravagant and stunning we make our products and packaging the more people want to take photos for their Instagram the more sales we have. So I looked more at phrases we could easily cut out in vinyl and stick on to any of our current packaging. I focused on cute catchy phrases that reflect our customer basis which I have grown to understand more throughout my time at Bottle Blonde.

Overall even though I haven’t finished yet I have had an amazing enhancement year and would recommend doing one to anyone given the opportunity. If this unfortunately isn’t something offered to you as apart of your course you can always do summer internships and other holidays, as many companies offer shorter placements for holidays. Industry years help you solidify your knowledge, learn new skills, generally develop. I am more confident to go into my final year in September and hopefully I will come back with updates on my final major collection.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been back at BB HQ and catching up on everything that’s been going on the past 2 weeks. Whilst Chloe has been away the team who were in the office were very productive and got lots of orders sent out. At the beginning of the week I met with one of the other interns to talk about our shoe designs and look at each other’s work giving feedback. Looking at each other’s work and seeing the different approaches helped us both with developing our work further prior to showing it to Chloe for the final shoe choices. Peer feedback has always been incredibly helpful at uni to ensure the best sketchbooks and I have found out also useful in industry when working in small teams.

After our catch up the work for the week began and this week I have been dipping in and out of different areas getting to learn more about how products are made, designing web graphics and designing packaging. I began with learning more about how the iconic jackets and earrings are made. Chloe wants to reshoot the dolly earrings in all colours which involved us making new pairs in every colour. I had previously made keyrings with the team for an event so I had some mild knowledge of how they are made but this time I got to do more of the assembly rather than just folding tinsel in half. The earrings were assembled quite easily for my hands although I did nearly burn my hands a couple of times. Although my hands don’t function fully I loved getting to be a bit more hands on. Jewelry construction is something that has always been of interest to me and I feel these skills combined with our workshops from first year have potential to develop even if only for personal use.

I also began designing some new packaging for Bottle Blonde, not only am I designing shoe boxes but general clothing and accessories packaging and graphics to be put into the packages. Of course like any project I instantly started researching what exists, what could be innovative for us and what I need to achieve with said product. I chose to focus on shoe boxes first as that is the only product we intend to produce currently that we don’t have any packaging for. I researched into some recycled packing ideas with an aim to reduce the waste at BB. However as the final shoe choices haven’t been made yet once finishing my initial research I moved onto researching if our current packing could be adapted. As we do reworked vintage jackets, graphic tee’s and personalised bags, I chose to look into stick on features for our current packing to make it even more extra than it already is. In order to design them I took several photos of our packaging and then began to write and edit phrases straight onto the packing to give a more visual concept to show Chloe. This is only the beginning though and I shall be developing and researching more and more to create hopefully some sustainable quirky packaging.

Finally in my personal life this week as it was Mother’s day I went home for the day to see my family. We took mum out for a meal and generally tried to relieve her stress for a day. I have also began to look into places I wish to visit for inspiration towards my final year and planning these trips out with my boyfriend. As September draws ever closer I feel strongly that whatever I do I want to incorporate as much digital elements and my print skills as I possibly can.

Hi all,

This week has been rather dull in terms of work, as Chloe is still away I went home to Leicester to continue working on my shoe designs and a couple of shoe box designs and see my family. As I’m at home I have access to all of my art supplies so I took the opportunity to experiment with some hand drawn skins. I learnt about skin drawing whilst I was working at Amanda Kelly in London and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out my skills and see if I have improved.

Normally because of my hand issues I draw everything on my computer as it’s painful drawing on paper. However when trying to draw leopard prints on a computer I haven’t quite mastered how I wanted them to turn out yet so I tried drawing them by hand as I was taught to do in London. I’m personally rather happy with how they turned out, and I hope Bottle Blonde will be equally happy with the designs they are incorporated into. You can see my leopard skin print attempts below.

I also took the opportunity to do some splatter paint prints as this is extremely hard to achieve the same effect on the computer. Unfortunately I didn’t have any neon paint to match in with Bottle Blonde’s colour scheme, however with a bit of Photoshop using some more skills I learnt about prints in London it was easy to change the colours to fit in. Once I had drawn all my different styled leopard prints I scanned them in and got to work. I learnt about how to colour separate patterns whilst working in London but discovered the same tools were extremely useful for changing colours of patterns and smoothly adding hand drawn elements into my prints. Below you can see the original scan of a print and then an example of how I have photoshopped the background and strokes to make sure the print was even.

In my personal life this week as I have been home for the week I went to pottery with my godmother and had great fun painting and molding clay. I decided I wanted to make 3 Brian the snails and I was given a gnome and inspired by my godmother to paint him to look like my boyfriend which turned out wonderfully.

Hi everyone,

This week was an unusual week in terms of work space as I started the week in Iceland and then have been working from home for the rest. I’m going to be working remotely for 2 weeks including this week as Chloe the founder and owner of Bottle Blonde is away for her sister’s wedding abroad.

When designing patterns I often find that a lot of my time is spent drawing elements that can be reused in other prints. As I am working for one brand producing prints for exclusively their company I can reuse shapes when designing patterns. However if I were working for a print design house for example Amanda Kelly that I worked for in London, I would not be able to as they sell to many different brands and it could jeopardize the company if they sold 2 similar prints to different brands. Designing prints for Bottle Blonde however it is helpful for me to have this database of elements that fit in with the brands vision, this includes shapes, patterns for example checkers and skins.

When it comes to drawing skins I learnt that there are endless ways you can draw them and they still not be the same however when selling a skin they can look too similar for sale. For my shoe designs I’ve decided to put into practice some of the knowledge of skins I learnt in London and attempt to draw some myself. I chose to begin with a Zebra print as I wanted to try and keep as much of my illustration digital this week. To draw the zebra print I researched zebra prints and took several as inspiration for my own. I chose to use illustrator to draw my first zebra print as I wanted to achieve a very graphic rather than realistic as you can see the beginning of below. 

Drawing on illustrator is something I have done a lot of whilst working for Bottle Blonde and it’s helping me to improve my accuracy skills which aid’s my flat drawings. However as I have done so much drawing on illustrator I’m looking at how I can make my prints for free flowing, more natural and see if I can add hand drawn elements in, so hopefully there shall be some interesting things to come in the next few weeks.

In my personal life this week I have been asked if I would like to join a project to design and build website for Dance Research. I was very surprised to receive the email asking if I would like to take on the project and am excited to help them build the site they want. Hopefully I’ll be able to build my own web design skills as well as help them achieve their goals with the site. A brilliant bonus is that I will also be getting paid for creating the site, it’s not much but with an unpaid placement year and bills to pay it’s great.

Hi everyone,

This week was the return to Bottle Blonde. I was ecstatic to be going back to Bottle Blonde and work on more prints and designs for the company. Currently we are working on producing the first set of manufactured clothes for Bottle Blonde and my task for the next couple of weeks is to work on unisex shoes and the boxes to go with them. 

Like with any brief I began my week researching the style of shoe Chloe wants to be produced. As the brand is very bold and 70s/80s/90s we are designing platform boots as the first shoe the brand will produce. I spent most of my week researching the shoes, styles of patterns and how they could be applied to the shoe, for example printed, embroidery or appliqué. Towards the end of the week I started to develop my shoe shape inspired by my research and my personal shoe preferences. Below you can see a page of my shoe research from the internet. 

Once I developed some initial shoe shapes I could start to design some prints for the shoes which I can’t show you quite yet but I feel they strongly match in with the brand. Working on shoe design is very different to all other internship work I have done so far this year as rather than just designing a print it’s for a specific product and I am able to design the product which it’ll be on. This has allowed me to put into practice my design skills and understand more how I could work print design into my final major project.

Finally in my personal life this week I actually went on a short holiday to Iceland! And no I’m not on about the supermarket. Me and my boyfriend went on a long weekend away to Iceland and it was one of the most amazing experiences. My trip has begun to inspire ideas for my research for my final major project and I took some amazing photos whilst there. If you ever get an opportunity to go to Iceland I would fully recommend going.