First Thoughts

 1. Expressionism

The first thought that came up to my mind when thinking about expressionism is the children cartoon tv series I watched every day before school starts, back when I was in elementary school. The funky colour and exaggeration of the character features in the animation is what reminds me the most with expressionism. Relating this theme to my subject area, I was thinking of creating a costume inspired by the characters and the atmosphere of the tv series focusing on the exaggeration of shapes and colour. I would also like to incorporate asymmetrical geometric shapes to the costume. 

For the 2d outcome, I would like to recreate the characters in the tv series into a characters or model of my runway shows. I would take the character's unique shapes and colour to put into the garment collection that I will be making as a digital collection overview. The characters will be recreated into the 'human' version of themselves pictured wearing the garment collection that I design according to their character.

2. Earthly Delights

When thinking about 'earthly delights', there are so many ideas came up to my head, which I will explain briefly below. 'Earthly Delights' for me is mostly centered around nature where my first idea is to make a garment inspired by different textures of nature from using different technique of fabric manipulation to showcase  a variety of textures like the rocks that could made by the scrunching technique or the mushroom texture by using ruffles or silk drapery.

Another idea is to take 'overconsumption and high-end brand's lies' as the topic. I personally think that the overprice luxury item only encourage middle class society towards overconsumption of unsustainable fashion. For this topic, I could probably make a fashion magazine or newspaper that talks about this issue while showcasing a variety of ways to make fashion more sustainable.

Moving on similar to this topic, another idea is to use organic and locally source materials to create a sustainable garment piece by using natural dye from fruits and plants, using scrap fabric for the garment and dried fruit peel for the accessories. 

3. Bauhaus

Bauhaus focus on simplicity, functionality and contemporary style. For this theme there is one idea that came to my mind which is making a functional and multi-purpose jacket that could turn into a skirt, crop top, and a bag by using a lot of zippers to separate the section. I once saw this on a social media platform, and I think that it really fits the 'Bauhaus' theme. A designer that remind me of this theme is Yayoi Kusama and her simple but unique dots style.

4. Mixed Media

For this theme, I know what I would like to make. Just like the name, I would like to incorporate various different media to create a garment piece focusing on raw materials like using loose weaving technique, crochet, hemp rope and plaster into a patchwork style. 

From all four themes, I think that "Earthly Delights' theme have the most ideas I could develop as well as new form of media I'm interested to try to make like making a fashion magazine or newspaper. But I also think that 'mixed media' theme is very interesting and exciting because I would like to experiment with a lot of different media to try to make it into one connecting piece. 

New Walk Museum Exhibition

This exhibition present expressionism through a range of media like paintings and sculpture. Below is several of the sketches that I made from a painting that inspire me to relate expressionism with my subject area.

This painting by Oskar Kokoschka caught my eyes with its pop of colour and the self-portrait that reminds me of crayon drawing by a child but at the same time it also shows a unique and confident line that artist have. I also like the messy font and placement of the text that somehow looks like vintage movie poster. 

The painting above by Ernst Kirchner interests me by its excellence use of abstract line to clearly portray its subjects. I tried to do a quick sketch to recreate the painting however I struggle to make straight line and not curvy or "chicken scratching" for the body figure like on Ernst painting. To better imitate his line technique, I may need to use bolder pen to make one confident line. 

One thing that amaze me the most from this sculpture is the women's despair expression that looks so real to me as if its not a wooden figure, but a real actor act in her play in front of me. Her arm position on her head also strengthen the 'despair' emotion of the subject. 

As I have already thought about making something inspired by cartoon-style and child scribble if I'm going to take expressionism as my theme for the project, so this paintings caught my eyes because it look similar to what I have on my mind. The color and the 'carefree' scribble is what I want to include on my project for the expressionism theme. 

The painting above does not really relates to any idea I have about expressionism, however the artist's way of using mark making technique (linear hatching) to 'colour' the subject and give its dimension is what interest me about this painting.