Introduction
“How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”
Throughout history, fashion and clothing fads have grown and changed based on the ways in which the world functioned at that time. Today, many of the current trends were inspired by some of these eras. Because of my interests in the history of fashion as well as design, I wanted to challenge myself to dig deeper into this skill and try my hand at creating my own original historical fashion designs. I chose to do my explorations project on this topic because I wanted to expand on some of the skills that I’d learned during the Narrative Project in Design and the Illustrator project in Digital Media. When I was doing the character design for the Illustrator project, I’d done some clothing drawing, but I wanted to try to improve even more on that concept, so I came up with this project idea.
In English class, we read the book Range by David Epstein, which focused on the importance of developing a variety of skills rather than focusing on only one. I’m very interested in both history and fashion, so I thought that this project topic would allow me to create something that fell across multiple domains of knowledge, which I think demonstrated the idea of having range and being a generalist quite nicely. Of the 21st century learning skills, I believe that my project contains Visual Literacy and Creativity
Process
The production process started with the research portion. To be able to design historically accurate clothing, I needed to find references and preexisting designs so that I could build off of to create my own final project. I created mood boards for each decade that I wanted to focus on. From these, I was able to gather information about popular styles and color schemes that I would later implement into my project
After I was satisfied with the moodboards I’d created, I began to sketch out my plans for each decade’s look. These sketches were very rough, and many don’t mirror the finished results very closely. As I got further into the project, my ideas and visions ended up changing considerably and so did the final designs.
I made color palettes for each decade based on the colors that I saw frequently from each of the looks in my moodboards. These were the final drafts of the palettes. I tried various other color schemes for a few of the looks before deciding on each of these.
Between May 12th and 29th, I worked in Adobe Illustrator to create each of my designs. These pictures show my progress from just starting off in Illustrator to the final lineart.
Final Production
I’m proud of how my final design turned out and I think I did a fairly good job maintaining historical accuracy throughout the project. If I had more time, I would add more shading and possibly textures, but with the limited time we were given for this project, I’m happy with my outcome. I can definitely say that after this project, I feel more comfortable using Adobe Illustrator, and am excited to continue using it in the future.
Reflection
Despite it being difficult initially, I really enjoyed the freedom that the explorations project gave me. I did feel pressured by the limited time, but I found ways to appropriately manage my time and work hard to meet deadlines. I learned a lot of important skills and grew significantly as a digital artist and creator during this unit. I hope to improve even more in the future and work toward mastering my abilities in some of these areas.
Experimental Music
In Digital Media, we were assigned to make an original song using the application Pro Tools. I worked with Kali Micetich on this project and we had a lot of fun working together to produce music. As neither of us had much prior knowledge about this kind of project before, it was a learning experience for both of us.
In the beginning, we had no initial ideas for creating our song. We started by playing around on the keyboard and adding ascending piano notes. At Freestyle, we have a lot of opportunities to peer review and work together, but we rarely get to work on the same projects. This project was a fun and unique collaboration experience, and we both feel that we’ve grown as music creators. Despite initial difficulties with Pro Tools, we persevered and tried our best. In our opinion, our original song represents our journey at Freestyle and experimental mentality throughout the year. song title, “GNOS” is the word “song” spelled backward. If we were to do this again, we likely would plan out our process more fully before beginning and spend more time getting comfortable with the program.
