Printing & New imagery.

I have been working with heavier wools this week within the print room, working with dyes to create ground to work on. The wools were a lot harder to dye as wool is a lot more absorbent so the colour appears less vivid than on silk. I found this to be the same when printing onto the fabric, the pigment soaked further into the wool, dulling the colour. The silks allowed the pigment to sit on top creating vibrant contrasts between foreground and background.
It was suggested in tutorial that this perhaps could be enhanced by the fact I've dyed the wools myself, and it would perhaps help to source my own pre dyed wools where the colours would have a higher vibrancy.
I did however use the multihead embroidery machine on top of the wool prints, and feel that the stitch really lifted the prints, as the colours are much more vibrant within the threads, therefore lifting all of the back ground colours.

I felt it important to start creating drawings for my new collection sooner rather than later, so that I can run both collections alongside each other. I have been focusing on developing a colour palette this week, which I struggled with as I was unsure where to gain colour inspiration. Going back to the postcards by Margaux Soland at the Barbican shop, gave me inspiration and a starting point to work from.

Margaux Soland

Initial drawing I found hard as the visual inspirations are so different to what I am used to working with. I found trying to create clean lines to be hard, and the drawings weren't working in the graphic nature I was intending, and looked quite basic.

Illustrator proved to be a great tool in extracting shapes and creating composition and pattern, and creates the clean graphic lines that I wanted to achieve.
I think the Illustrator prints are really starting to work, and perhaps this is the way I will draw for this project, especially with the project being short, it's useful to be able to change around design ideas quickly.