Coventry – Week 7

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.