36 Blackbird, Fly

I know grading for Art is over but I did this the other day and have become accustomed to posting anything art-related on this space. (That's a good thing, right?) Anyway in my boredom of mugging I decided to challenge myself by coming up with a wearable collection of clothes.

Sounds strange, but seeing as most of my inspiration comes from runways and couture and whatnot, my designs tend to be in the form of gowns and runway pieces- wearable, but for the red carpet, not your typical suburban shopping mall. So I came up with a couple of sundresses.

One thing that always intrigued me when I started trying to turn my hobby of fashion design into something more serious a couple of years ago, was how designers came up with prints. Before that I always squiggled curly lines where I wanted prints to go, and I assumed designers just blew up stock images from Google Images (hahahahaha, I know). Now I'm paying more attention to detail (eg. HOW TO DRAW LACE... still a novice at that, I'm afraid).

I've heard some designers design prints based on their own photographs, which they manipulate digitally. Sounds interesting, so I decided to try it myself. I've always got some prints in mind but I never really know how they'll turn out.

Using Paint, I came up with this strange gem shape. It looks kind of religious, doesn't it.

I coloured in this hummingbird illustration (from Google...) using the watercolour tool on Paint, with reference to kingfishers. I know, I know, my references are all over the place.

I took this screenshot cos I thought it looked funny, like birds were attacking Powerpoint.

Taa-daa!

I like the background blue, and the hummingbird turned out lovely, but the gem shape looks kind of strange. I thought it would be nice to have a few not-quite-white gems falling in the middle of the birds but bleh, I probably got bored and dumped this strange symbolic-looking... thing instead.

35 All Hands on Deck!

I've been at it again, doing product photography and making spreads... during EOYs...

31 InStyle Sketches

The very first fashion magazine I bought was InStyle back in December 2008. I've been a loyal follower since. Recently I bought a quintessential pack of yellow Post-Its, and celebrated a particularly drowsy morning with a fake cover.

I used to make fake covers of friends and family using Photoshop to frame for presents.

Last year I used my tablet to draw this (on reflection, very ghastly) sketch of Diane Kruger's InStyle UK cover. It's kind of embarrassing, but a testimony to how InStyle's stayed with me all this while.

next up: pictures of the lanterns!

29 Wish You Were Here

above is a photo manipulation i made on photoshop. i usually blend images together using the clone tool and use curves to try and make their colour schemes compatible if the originals were shot in different lighting (i usually do manips for film screenshots), but this time i decided to do something a little more jarring. so i took a photo from gabrielle angeline photography (her website is here), made it black and white, and cropped it in a very angular fashion... then i set it against a picture of a sunrise, which i got from google images and then put to high contrast.

i don't really like how the background turned out but you may be interested to know that this was inspired by the set of postcards currently hanging in front of the sinks in the mac lab. one of them reads: i wish you were here/ because that would make the rest of my day. i thought it was brilliantly creative and set the second line as the 'subtitle' of this photo when i posted it to tumblr.

unfortunately my personal computer crashed at the beginning of term 4 and took my photoshop down with it. i've been having withdrawal symptoms since, especially since i only just started rediscovering some of the better functions of photoshop and exploring with photo manipulations.

25 Posters

recently my mum suggested that I try out product design, and when I asked her what it was, she was like, "you know, you said you like Ikea... like, you know, chairs!" and I'm like, "CHAIRS??? Can you imagine CNY visits? 'What do you do, Grace?' 'I design chairs.'" And I was all laughing and stuff and couldn't take it seriously. but then now whenever i go out and see something and i'm like, "i love this! the design totally makes me want to buy it! it pops! it's so unique, so simple, so graphic!" and my mum wiggles her eyebrows and says slyly, "product... design..."

I would have been OK with it had she not suggested chairs as an initial example. Thanks, mum.

Anyway, aside from product photography/design I really like using photoshop to create posters and "magazine spreads", etc etc, which is what sparked off my idea of working in a magazine so I can write AND do this graphic thing at the same time. not to say i'm definite about wanting that as a career, but it's an idea.
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first off, some posters I did for my cca's publicity at the sec 1 cca exhibition this year.

i edited the penguin books cover! i love this one

this was the original concept for all the subgroup posters; i wanted it to be kind of vintage and outlandish

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then some notebook covers for some handmade notebooks my class was selling for funfair this year.

the words on the burnt slip say 'social butterfly'

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sometimes i do moodboards on photoshop for the fun of it. i think of it as fake magazine spreads.

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some publicity posters for my class's booth for funfair this year... just playing on people's fandoms, of course! our taylor swift and shinee ones got stolen off the walls- i don't know if i should take that as a compliment or not because we'd actually already 'choped' the posters amongst ourselves in class to keep after the funfair.

they're all basically the same layout but with different boxes and fonts. 

I also do the design for my cca's newsletter, INKED. you can check out all the spreads here! (shameless advertising)

17 Sec 4 Lifeskills Camp Logo Design

I previously blogged my designs for last year's lifeskills camp, where the theme was Self-discovery. If that theme was vague, then consider this: this year's theme was 'A respected member of society'. Given that we could just casually refer to last year's camp as OBS, i found myself at a lack of ideas for how to translate "ARMOS" into a logo design... (you can't just write 'armos' and expect outsiders to understand, can you?)

Hence I relied mostly on last year's theme of GRACES for ideas. The three main motifs I drew upon were swans, lotuses and being a leader.

1. Swans, I feel, are some of the most graceful creatures around and there's a whole plethora of myths and stories about them to be explored. the challenge, therefore, was to make a swan-related logo that wasn't in the least cliched.
2. Lotuses- because when I was learning about Buddhism two years ago i discovered how lotuses are actually respected flowers or motifs in some cultures because of the way they grow. Lotuses push through the mud and bloom above the water, which is a really beautiful metaphor for rising above challenges and difficulties in life to triumph.
3. Being a leader was probably the hardest to put in a picture, but nevertheless probably more related to 'armos' than swans...

my first sketch, using the motif of a swan- on the right you can see my different ideas for composition, on how to integrate 'sec 4 lifeskills camp' into the final design. i had originally planned on using the reflection as a space for writing but decided to change that for the final design so i could draw out the swan's reflection properly.

lotus- I explored different ways of drawing the lotus and how different things could be put on (or in!) it. however, I feel that a lotus here is not a really obvious symbol for the aim of the camp, which is a pity because it's really such a beautiful flower! on reflection i could have gone for other animals instead, like peacocks, which some others used- a really majestic animal which translates really well on logos :)

being a leader- the pyramid thing kind of looks like a red carpet, doesn't it? i drew on the idea of a toilet sign (yes, really) representing an anonymous, all-woman kind of figure, someone who could represent anyone, really, and thus decided that a Nanyang girl should be more than that to be a respected member of society. Hence i drew a Nanyang girl in front with four anonymous figures behind her.

my final design. now looking back I realize I made the same mistake of not properly utilising thick lines and negative space; the contrast between black and white could have been stronger to make the design really stand out. As it is, however, I'm proud of the logo's fluidity and the curves which I tried so long to perfect!

12 Digital Fashion Design

I might have mentioned in my post about my fashion design module that I used my tablet to do the design. I got a tablet at the start of last year because I'd been interested in having one for a while and wanted to use it to work on designs. Unfortunately I've learnt that while colouring and adding textures is certainly much more of a breeze, drawing and controlling the brush is definitely much harder than drawing with pencils! However last year I still managed to draw some in my free time... not very professional but I'm rather proud of them anyway because of the time I invested in each.

 one of my first designs... a wedding gown which was supposed to be very light mint, with a lace yoke and tulle overlay. Obviously my attempt at drawing lace was quite futile but... alright, I always fail at drawing lace. And details, actually.

 ...the skirt was supposed to be peacock feathers for this one.

 I love this, except for the face. At this point in time I was still using Paint and not Photoshop to do my drawings and I accidentally coloured black into the face and couldn't undo it, much to my detriment because until then I had been working for HOURS to get everything else right. As you could probably imagine, digital art is not like art on paper because you can't see the whole canvas at 100% when you're working on it, it's got to be detail by tiny detail so many a time I zoomed out only to see that the part I had been painstakingly sketching out was disproportionate. This dress, if I remember correctly, had a sheer long-sleeved yoke with origami-like folds for the bodice and peplum skirt. And totally awesome feather heels! I wish I had them in real life.

 Inspired by one of my favourite books, Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale. It's a GREAT story and you should really read it! In it, the heroine Isi is a naive princess sent to the neighbouring country of Bayern to marry its crown prince, who she's never met. However on the way her lady-in-waiting and soldiers rebel against her and steal her title, going on to the city masquerading as the real princess. She is left to fend for herself for the first time and does so by becoming a goose girl (hence the title)... This plot is complicated by the fact that she has nature-speaking, or can speak the language of the wind as well as birds. The story tells how she matures and grows strong as a person and eventually fights to get her rights back.
I wanted a dress to capture her at the end (the book's the first in a wonderful series). Isi is a truly remarkable character- she's humble, graceful, and really like a normal person until you realize she's royalty. Like a swan, really- so I designed this gown with flower appliques on the bodice, sheer sleeves and -though you can't really see it here- a circlet round her hair! And royal blue for the background for obvious reasons.

 Inspired by a woman I saw during one of my holidays in Malaysia, who was wearing a yellow top with a lace bib. This is a little Alice-in-Wonderland-y, but I love the hair! I wish I was a redhead, actually. They have all the fun ;-)

 One of my favourites EVER. It took AGES to do on Photoshop and in the end it still didn't really look like it did on paper and in my head but overall still beautiful. If I can remember correctly it's that shade of light pink featured at the side, with black chiffon wrapped all around in the style of a bandage dress, but with a very frilly cascading one-sleeve. This was after my fashion design module when I rather liked the idea of firmly pleated ruffles.

Inspired by a Gucci design. Not really well drawn..

I'd designed this dress earlier and wanted to try drawing in the style of an advertising campaign, in this case H&M's. If you're wondering about the 'secret kook society' that keeps appearing, it's the name of my personal blog.

Inspired by a Gucci dress... I wanted something terribly mod and pop-art.

Once again inspired by H&M. I rather like this because I sketched it without any resources, ie not knowing how a person is supposed to look taking off her heels ;-) Not bad!

really ugly font in the balloon now that I take a closer look. this was when I was thinking of pitching some wearable designs to successful blogshops in the hope of getting some of my designs manufactured. I never got round to doing it, but this look was inspired by someone I saw on Garance Dore's fashion blog. A nude pink top with a slightly flared black skirt and -if you can see it- snakeskin belt. The background was off Google Images.

I love this too- especially the neckline, and the colour, and the font, and the background. Oh everything! It's quite advertisement-y too. I like looking at advertisements in magazines and analysing their layouts, compositions. One of my favourites is Marc Jacobs', because his pictures are always very recognisable and set in a stark white background with plain black words, as opposed to most campaigns where the photos take up the whole page.

07 Fashion Design Module Final Project

sketches 1

sketches 1

stimulus 1

draft version

stimulus 2

final version using Photoshop

Following aforementioned fashion design module, we had to come up with one final design based on the stimulus pictures above. I came up with 10 sketches and combined a few ideas to come up with the final design shown in the last picture. I am not very satisfied with the proportions of the models, once again, as I used Photoshop and my tablet to trace pictures and I used different models for the two sides, hence the difference. Also the green didn't turn out as well as I expected- on the computer it was lime green and I didn't see that it was cut off before the hem. Many many hours went into drawing this -you can't believe how much my hand hurt and how much I cursed the computer- so for that I'm grateful for the result.

06 Fashion Design Module Sketches

Traces of (L-R) Salma Hayek, Kate Hudson and Emma Watson from InStyle and TeenVogue magazines

We had the chance to select a module of our choice last year for a term, and I decided to pick Fashion Design. It wasn't really that much of a decision because I've been into fashion my whole life and until recently was planning to go to design school for university. This course was truly enriching for me as it made me look at my passion from a more practical point of view- to place my talents with others and also to realize that fashion designing involves a lot more than inspiration and imagination.