Graphics: Making Textures From Fabric

Following my work in Illustrator and using Textures found on the Internet. The next thing that I did was to go into the fashion studios and steal all their fabrics to create a bunch of different textures using a bunch of techniques I learnt in my pathway stage such as Weaving and different ones such as making fake furs and wrapping yarns around cardboard.

Wrapping fabrics around card.

Layering of Fabrics and crisscross patterns.

Making of PomPoms                                                          Fake Fur sewn onto fabric



Weaving.

All of these will make for some interesting textures once captured with a camera. The close up shots then edited in photoshop will turn out really nicely I feel.
These first few textures focused very much of soft and loose styles, next I moved onto using heat over fabric to make more shiny and raw textures.

Using a soldering iron I cut around a star shaped biscuit cutter to cut through layered fabrics to make shapes.

Using Shibori techniques I elastic banded pasta and coins into man made materials and then used a head gun to form the fabrics around such shapes to give off this effect.

I used the same Shibori techniques on plastic as well to see what sort of effects could be had. As well as using a heat gun to make lines into the plastic to cause different effects.

Lastly combining the Shibori with the Soldering iron to add even more detail and texture into these piece.

 Once these textural piece are photographed and converted they'll turn into a very useful set of digital textures and photographs.

Graphics: Illustrator

Having completed my pathway stage, I decided to specialise into Graphics, this was largely down to the fact it was the pathway I enjoyed the most and was the area where i wanted to learn more. Having specialised I was then given my first brief 'Elements of Design'.

Like the pathway stage this brief is very much an experimental way into graphical techniques, such as: Line, Tone, Value, Depth, Shape, Texture, Colour and Space. The main reason for this is to acquire a bunch more skills which we can then further dive into when given more specific briefs.

For the first part of this lesson I was given the task for going into Illustrator, which I had near to no knowledge of bar making typography pieces. With that I was told to use just the basic shapes to create very simple animals, which I would then be adding textures to in layers to give off different interesting effects. 

Having got my basic shapes down I then took my Panda head and fox head that I made and started to add textures I found online to these shapes. First I went for a monotone type effect for the panda heads sticking to there original colours. However I'm not really sure I chose decent textures which work together as they're very detailed textures and as such clash.
With that in mind, for the foxes I decided to use related textures on the same piece. This worked well as using rock, wood, rust and hyper detailed textures on the same piece turned out rather well. I think my favourite piece is the rust textures. As these 3 different textures contrast really well with one another. I also like the hyper detailed one as the colours are so in your face it makes the fox head look even more interesting. Because of that I decided to down scale that piece and repeat it over an A4 size page to create a pattern.

I think this turned out really nicely and makes me think of other ways in which these designs could be used. If I made say a deer or a Robin the design could easily be used for Christmas cards. Or going along with the current designs, stickers, pins or even logos. There are so many different uses for these quick little designs.

Lastly I wanted to take my fox design one step further and give the poor fella a body to go along with his majestic head. Looking back at this piece now I wish I either made the body more pointy like the head, or made the head more pointy to go with the softer rounded body. However after completing the outline in Illustrator I then came up with the not so original idea of a 'fire fox' and as such only used fire and light textures to finish him off.
I really like the effect this gives off and I will be going back at some point to create a more rounded off fox before adding texture to give a more finished feel to the piece. I would normally use photoshop for this sort of piece but the more I use Illustrator I feel the more I will end up coming around to it.