PPD Term 1

Design Session 1 

London College of Fashion which will introduce to me with more diverse professional knowledge about fashion. Fashion design emphasizes the importance of research, analysis and ideas development for creative solutions and concepts. I think I am capable to fit in this course with my strong research skills. Additionally, I will be able to put forward my ideas into practice facilitated by the rich resources in LCF. The tutors and students are also very thoughtful here and I was able to get a lot of different ideas and share and gain different information. Last weekend I went to visit the Tate modern museum and took some photos of the artworks. The artist I chose was Marie Laurencin, who is a female artist. Based on my research of her paintings and style, I found that she uses impressionistic colors and rococo style to depict joyful female groups and a unique female aesthetic. Marie Laurencin paints beautiful, innocent, dreamy women, a world in which no man is involved, a world that she sees as perfect. I was captivated by this style. In the design class, I brought my collage research on Marie Laurencin and the tutor asks us to trace some shapes we like and turn them over to make them symmetrical according to the research done by the artist of our choice. We will then use this pattern as inspiration to place on various parts of the body to get a coat, and then we can lengthen and shorten it, widen and narrow it according to our own design, so that we can get more new designs and broaden our ideas in these ways. 

Design Session 2 

I have always believed that color has a very powerful effect on the human psyche, color is all about influencing emotions and visual senses, and also in business it can be an effective way of communicating brand and product messages to users, and people react differently to different colors. Because the tutor recommended an app called PANTONE STUDIO to us in class, this app can take the images we choose and absorb the colors to get a set of well-matched color swatches, and based on this swatch, I colored my designs. I’m not very confident with coloring but with the swatches I feel I can’t go wrong with anything. The safe colors for me are black and white. Both black and white are colorless, it is often much harder for people to remember things in black and white than in color, for example scenes in black and white films are harder to remember than scenes in color films and all colors other than black, white and grey have chromatic properties. The style of the artist I am researching is to use soft tones, mostly plain and elegant colors and organza is a fabric I would like to use, with large areas of white space and a spray paint rendering. 

Media Session 1 

The artist I researched was Marie Laurencin, so the style of the shoes I designed was about herself. The class consisted of shooting a short film about the shoes we designed. As the main character of the shoot was the shoes, I put my center directly on the shoes at the beginning and I was not going to borrow a model, I shot the whole film by myself. I didn’t feel very confident about the shoot because I didn’t think I had the right clothes for the day and I didn’t know how to master and zoom in on the close-ups of the shoes. I wanted to get it good, but it didn’t look as good as I thought it would. I went to the tutor and showed her the video I had shot and asked for help with some of the problems I had encountered. The tutor was so kind, she listened patiently to my problems and agreed that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing, I just needed to edit and change the filters more, and told me that it would be better with background music. I was very impressed with the lesson and I hope to try it again next time I have the chance and hopefully improve my editing skills and aesthetics. 

Media Session 2 

I was interested in the content of the class. The task was to conduct an interview article, in which my partner and I were the interviewer and interviewee, and to get to know each other, we prepared some personal questions and visited each other’s social accounts to find some photos that fit the style. After gathering the material for the interview article, I started editing and laying it out. This was the first time I had experimented with the layout of an interview article and it was really enjoyable. I chose to edit the photos into a Polaroid format and insert them into the interview article. The overall design was film and vintage, similar to the style of the individuals I interviewed. Moreover, I took photos of my shoes in advance because I had the task of creating a press release for the footwear with written & images, I took this photo shoot of the shoes very seriously and I wanted to present my shoes well. As my shoes were in pink, I prepared a pink Mohair cardigan, a cowhide skirt and a pair of black socks. 

Visual studies 2 

In this class, we can draw outcomes from still life observations of shoes. Using the finished drawing, we begin to deconstruct the drawing to create a collage for use in fashion illustration. Tutor also taught us that we could use tracing paper and layout paper to experiment with fashion illustration. One of my favorite steps is the drawing created in the drawing and the shapes translated into positions on the body, cutting out shapes that conveying the idea of the fashion design. The final step is to color the pieces, the coloring part allows us to paint the parts of the dress in different colors according to our own ideas. What makes this step interesting to me is that not only do we need to color, but we can also add different patterns and designs to the colors. The addition of different patterns, even in the same colour, will give a garment a different effect. Through this more than one month of practice, I think I have improved a lot in my drawing. But there is still a problem, I can draw a picture quickly, but for some details, I can’t make the picture look good. So I think it is a weakness and I should improve it and do more exercises in drawing, this is something I need to learn more about. 

Business Session 1 

International: Introduction to the Study of Fashion program at London College of Fashion includes not only fashion design, but also fashion media and fashion business, which will introduce to me with more diverse professional knowledge about fashion.  The pathway I’m most interested in at the moment is Fashion Media, I used to only want to study design but I’ve been exposed to a lot of different courses since I came here. The design course taught me how to draw better, the business course taught me a lot about fashion brands and the structure of fashion. Media also taught me how to present a good piece of work. Styling really appealed because as a lover of fashion and design, you get to play with everyone else’s designs. I thought I wanted to be a designer, but I realized I wanted to see the final pictures, rather than people buying and then wearing them on the street.  I think fashion media is very much about research, including mind maps, so it requires a lot of knowledge and brain power. It takes a lot of knowledge and brain power to summarize all the research and make a mood board to put together outfits. Use it from a myriad of different angles and discover it, and you will be surprised by the unexpected. 

Business Session 2 

Make a daily plan and tasks to make the most of the fragmented time, such as catching the golden memory time in the morning. Improving social skills and logical thinking skills, as these two skills are combined with verbal skills, and because fashion business is not the same as fashion design, a lot of the time it is more about writing and analyzing as well as communicating with people. I do not think my English speaking skill is great, so it is important to improve my verbal skills. If I cannot even express something in Chinese without thinking logically, then when I express it in English, it will not be good, so I think I need to spend two hours a day practicing English. Visual Merchandising is one of the specialisms I am currently interested in in fashion business. Using the power of visual merchandising to plan and sell through display. Being able to help a brand turn an idea on paper into a presentation is simply the most exciting and fulfilling part of the job, and I think that’s what Visual Merchandising is all about. 

Creative Suite Session 1 

This is the first lesson on Photoshop since the start of this project. I was looking forward to the class on photoshop because it is a very powerful software and if you are good at it, it can be very handy and help solve a lot of problems when using it for fashion studies. The first thing I was interested in was how to adjust the filters. Through the tutor’s guidance, I found out that there are so many filters in Photoshop for me to choose from. The class was quite easy to understand and I had a lot of fun editing my photos with the Photoshop filters in the class.  When we work digitally all the time, especially for design students, the designs can lack a vividness and hand-drawing has a different role to play at different stages of design and for different products. Hand-drawing should be defined more as sketching. I don’t think there is any way that digital can replace manual, but hand drawing is also very important. It is important in working practice, as a product of the designer’s brainstorming, as a powerful complement to communication, and as a design style. I remember a BBC television programme 《The Secret of Drawing》 which also illustrated the important role that hand-drawing still plays in the art of realistic drawing and painting, as well as in various design industries today. 

Creative Suite Session 2 

The class was a bit difficult for me, I was a bit confused at the beginning of the task set by the tutor, I didn’t know how to start and I wasn’t familiar with the software in photoshop, so I became a bit out of step. The student sitting next to me was very nice and she helped me to solve the problem although the process was a bit bumpy. We were then taught the second skill that we needed to learn in this class: designing a garment (including the front and back of the garment) in photoshop. The tutor said that the steps now just involved finding a better traced image and tracing the lines according to the suit or uniform in the picture. I did well on this part, but one problem I had was that I needed to pay attention to the details of the suit, such as some of the folds, all of which I had to go through in Photoshop to represent it. I tried for quite a while but it still didn’t look too good, then I asked my tutor for help and he helped me to solve this problem very well. Through this study on Photoshop, I realized that there is really a lot to learn and if I want to be fully proficient in this software I need to spend more time practicing after class and also review the skills I learnt in class, which is very important. 

PPD Workshop  

I’ve been on the course for almost three months and I’ve learnt a lot about myself and what I like and what I’m good at. I think I’m good at research and mood board because I like to look at things and in my free time I like to browse fashion websites and magazines. And I have a habit of taking pictures of pretty pictures or pictures of styles that I like and saving them on my phone or my computer, so I have a Pinterest board that I’ve set up to collect inspirations that I’ve seen on Pinterest. I also have a weak skill in drawing, and sometimes I struggle because I feel like I’m doing a good job with collages, but I can’t translate my collages into something that’s about design, like clothing. Because my drawing skills are not very good, when I have an idea and I want to draw it, it doesn’t come out very well. So I’ve been improving my drawing skills and I’ve been taking out my notebook and drawing in my spare time at home. I’m interested in fashion media, especially styling, and I’m more interested in the transfer of images, styling, graphics, photography and staging than in the process of designing a garment from start to finish. I’m more interested in the bigger picture, in using different media to tell my story. I care more about the effect of the whole look on the body than I do about the effect of a single piece of clothing. That’s why I think I’m more suited to fashion media.