Fashion #2

Title: Alicia in Wonderland

Materials: colored pencils and bristle board

Dimensions: 9in. x 11in.

Artist statement:

For the second project in my art investigation, I decided to use nature as my influence. My investigation question is, "How do our surroundings influence fashion design?" Nature is around us every day and I wanted to create a piece of work that plays with the ideas and colors of the outdoors. I first started by taking notes of different flowers and butterflies from real photographs to create an understanding of texture and form. I also took different sketches of them and mixed different colors to create the scheme I wanted. I sketched using graphite my ideas for the first project. I wanted to incorporate butterflies as if they were flying off the dress to show flow and imagination.

For this project, I used colored pencils to create my drawing. I did use graphite for the sketches but I really wanted a vibrant material that could be shaded and used to create drawings of flowers and nature. It had to be soft enough to blend and small enough to get fine detail. I also used bristle board as my paper because it holds onto the colored pencil really well and doesn't show hard pencil marks as raised patterns.

I really wanted to create this project based on research. I didn't want the flowers to look realistic necessarily but I wanted to create designs and patterns to represent theories of floral growth and flow. I looked at lots of pictures to come up with my ideas and revised different dresses for the person in the picture. I really wanted to play with perspective. I wanted the person to look like it was in one huge flower garden and therefore create an imaginary place for ideas to form. Creating a different setting is super important and can show how our surroundings represent and influence our clothes we wear today from the colors and patterns to the styles and genres.