Influences of Summer

Since finishing my first year of the course I have found myself being interested in print, weave and knit. At the exhibition I thought it would be a great chance to see if I was more attracted to a certain area. I thought I would be heading towards more of the prints but I surprised myself by being excited by the weaves and knits there, in particular Christina Hesford and Jessica Alice Hogg. I love how delicate these collections are and how intricate they look. Particularly Christina’s hand woven work and puncture and repair pieces. Jessica Hogg’s work was my absolute favourite though, I found it so inspiring. I think the sheer white knit against the bold black and flashes of colour is really effective, as well as the pleats and textures created.

Christina Hesford

Jessica Alice Hogg

 I looked more into Jessica’s work through her blog and other online sources and found that she took inspiration from the skin being a part of her work, through creating a sheer fabric where the skin can be shown through and adding to her colour application. From this and reading lots of fashion magazines I found myself taking influence from the body structures in the magazine images. Particularly high fashion such as Vogue and Elle had lots of different body positions that made different shapes with the body.

After drawing the different shapes from the images I found, I looked into knitwear designers who use similar line use as I have been. Louise Goldin has very structural knitwear with loads of different overlapping shapes and folds similar to the shapes I have drawn. I also liked her colour scheme of light blues, greys and white.

Louise Goldin

Santiago Calatrava also designed an opera house with similar shape and lines as Louise Goldins collection. 

This has inspired me to move onto other structures around us like architecture, 

I found these structures to have more straight lines and a lot more detailed than drawing the body.

In particular I’ve been influenced by art deco windows, they have so much shape around them and lots of detail to draw from.

Art Deco doors