A busy yet productive week !

This past week has been very full on, it has to be said I started the beginning of the week feeling behind to be honest, I found that worrying about my dissertation title put me of balance and prevented me from moving forward with my project.

On monday I had my first one to one tutorial with Les, I found this helped me as it allowed to raise my concerns about my project as well as ask questions which where concerning me. I took my learning agreement to show Les as well as the images I had found on Pinterest which I am using as my inspiration within this project. Discussing my ideas for the project with Les allowed me to hear his views on my concept and I was happy with the feedback which he gave me, he understood my point of view and the concept which I am trying to achieve. 

when I got home from my tutorial I felt still a little panicked, I'm not sure why this was, I feel it may be as I saw the amount of work some of my fellow students already had compared to mine and I felt I was behind and this is never a good feeling. Because of this as soon as I got home I started drawing from images of flowers which I have taken over the years from Kew gardens, my own garden to the botanical garden I visited in Scotland.

Through my first visual studies of the 60s I saw that the floral designs / motifs used where more abstract than what I would consider realistic, because of this i decided to aim for my abstract drawing methods and media such as Mono printing, inks, gouache, felt-tips and water colours. Below are some images which I have been taking inspiration from within my drawings.

Here are some images of the drawings which I have been creating from my photos of flowers in the abstract styles of the imagery above.

I am pleased with how these initial drawings have turned out I particularly like how effective the mono printing has been, in the bottom image I have started to work back into the design using felt tips I feel this has worked well and is something I am going to develop further within my drawings.

On tuesday I had my Second Contextual studies lesson this time jill joined Felicity in the lesson. the soul purpose of the lesson was to solidify our ideas and create a question which are dissertation will be based upon. I had started to research into digital printing and traditional methods using the books I got from the library last week so I was going to lesson with more ideas and more focus than last week. We got into our groups and began to discuss our ideas with one another. Jill came to speak to my group I found she really helped me, I told her my ideas and she asked me question by doing this she was able to understand want I wanted to look at, I explained that I wanted my dissertation to link with my studio practice. Jill suggested that I look at 60s designers and look at how they used traditional techniques in the 60s and then look at how they are reinventing their designs for todays market using modern digital techniques. I really liked this idea and i feel that it will lend itself well to my studio practice. 

the designers i am going to look at are :

• Zandra Rhodes
• Celia Birtwell
• Biba
• Horrockses

my question is going to be:

How are 60s designs being reinvented through digital printing?

I left the lesson feeling more up beat and overall more settled in my title and now I just need to start my research.