Welcome Post: Art portfolio Two

 Before starting the third term, in this post I would like to reflect back to the previous term and discuss my action plan for the last term of my foundation year. Last term I have a major issue of my art portfolio one completion due to my poor time management skills in fitting the project-making weeks in the tight-schedule. As I was not fully satisfied with my final outcomes and my portfolio last term, therefore one of the significant things I would like to focus the most on this term is to be mindful about the timeline and the brief instruction at the beginning so I could plan ahead of time, how I will cary out my project. 

This term I hope I could get access to the many other fashion workshops which I think will be very helpful  for this term's project production process. Furthermore by getting more experience in new skills such as textile-dyeing, textile-printing, embroidery, knitwear-making, and many other skills related to fashion production, will help me to get more insight and ideas on what I should make for this term project based on the brief assigned for me. As I only have attended fashion-dyeing workshop in the second term, I really look forward to join other fashion related workshop especially weaving and knitwear-making workshop which what I'm passionate to explore deeper. 

During the break, I join the committee team of Indonesian Society that just formed quite recently in dmu. For our first event, we work together with Malaysian society to organize a Ramadan event for muslim to break their fast with various food from both Indonesia and Malaysia. From the event, I got to try delicious Malaysian cuisine including are laksa and mango sago dessert.

Individual Brief (Fashion Design)

My brief is to create a national costume from one country or city, anywhere in the world, which must have elements that represent the place. The final outcomes must include four 2d designs of the national costumes for a woman, a man, a child and one unisex design, as well as one 3d outcome of any of the four designs. These outcomes will be presented as a final portfolio that cover the concept, material and sustainability, background information of the chosen country, and the 2d and 3d outcomes.

Initial Ideas Generation

For my first ideas generation sketch, i got the word 'swoop'. At first, i had no idea what the word means. And then my friend told me that swoop can be like a curve or flowing line, he gave nike's logo as the example. As we only have 5 minutes to sketch, so i just went with the nike's logo and try to relate it with my fashion design brief. When i first thought about the curved on nike's logo, I immediately remembered about one of Indonesian's traditional clothing with upside down crescent moon shaped head accessories known as 'retu' from Nusa Tenggara Timur. For the clothing, I was thinking of using circle silhouette and made a two-tiered dress with lace and dangling beads, which are the characteristic of Nusa Tenggara Timur traditional clothing. I made another design sketch with the upside down crescent moon shaped in the lower of the dress and the 'swoosh' shape similar like the nike's logo for collar accessories. For this sketches, I made the garment loose-fitting with no waist curve showing. 

                                                      

Nusa Tenggara Timur traditional clothing

Moving on to my second sketch, the word that I got is 'crash'. Relating this to fashion, I thought about including quirky and eccentric fashion style into the design, as in my head, 'crash' in fashion could be mean as contrasting or unrelated colour, prints and element that are crashed or combined into a garment. Next to the keyword, i wrote several phrase to help me gather some ideas like 'unbalance', 'color-crashing', and 'gender-crashing' which mean that the garment combine both men and women clothing. With these ideas in mind, i sketch a top combining a men shirt with stripe pattern and puffy victorian sleeve as well as ruffle collar which i think show a strong femininity elements.  For the trouser, i add wrap skirt with floral decoration over a men's work trouser. To be honest, this design sketch was very strange and doesn't relate with my fashion brief except for the use of victorian sleeve for the cultural element of the garment. 

                                        

1893 Victorian sleeve

For my last ideas sketch, i got the word 'silhouette'. At first, I can't decide whether to use the silhouette meaning of  shadow or the other meaning of the overall shape of the garment. Therefore, I decided to combine both meaning by using dramatic silhouette of a wine glass for the dress and combining the traditional Chinese cross-collar with dramatic puffy skirt over the dress. I also add a flame shape decoration on the upper bodice, because red is the typical color used in Chinese clothing, and red also known as the color of anger or flame. And to include 'shadow' into the design, I thought of adding a long wedding-like train where at the end of the train will be shaped like the overall silhouette of the dress, making it looks like as if there's shadow following at the back. 

                                    

Continuing to the next session, which is to pick one of our design that will be recreate by our partner with their own impression or ideas. Looking at what Adrian's recreation of my Chinese dramatic silhouette dress, he explain that his idea was to convert the dress into a trouser while still keeping the dramatic silhouette of the wine-glass shape. The dress is divided into a separate top and trouser, which I assume he was thinking of converting the dress into a man version of the garment. 

His other sketch is the children's version of the garment which has a long sleeve with puffy skirt over the pants. Adrian's idea was quite vague and unclear for me to analyse in order to improve my initial sketch. However, looking at Adrian's recreation, it reminds me to not always stick with making women's garment only as there's other ideas for me to explore more, such as men and children's clothing. This is related to my project brief, that assign me to create four design of women, men, children and unisex. From the three initial ideas generation sketches that I made, the idea that i think i can sustain for the next nine weeks is the first idea of combining curved elemtent into Nusa Tenggara Timur clothing. The reason why is because I'm way more familiar with Indonesian traditional clothing compare to other national clothing, therefore i think that i can have more design ideas if i know and understand my inspiration well.