Art from my Archives!

I haven't gone through my portfolio in years! I have somehow had it in storage and managed to lug it over the years from Cape Town to Melbourne and it's finally settled in Perth.

I opened it the other day and it was like going into a time capsule. Most of the work is from school or student days when I was studying fashion design in Cape Town. I thought it would be nice to share with you.

I'll start with these two. Classic examples from our Life Drawing classes - my least favourite of any art class! Our models tended toward the haggard and dirty side of the scale.

They never seemed healthy and the result was that most of the class looked like they couldn't draw faces very well at all. These two sketches are from sessions in which we had to do 5 minute sketches. Every 5 minutes the model would change position and we would have to begin the next pose.

Another example of work we had to do in first year in Fashion Illustration class was
roughly tearing shapes out of paper and pasting them onto white board.
Once we had done this the idea was to let the shape inspire you and then very quickly fill it in with some sort of fashion illustration. These aren't very good, but I was only in first year and still had a long way to go.














This is an example of work done in the same class in second year. I think we were only allowed to use one medium and the theme was to design an illustration for jewellery or perfume for a magazine - old style, these days everything is a photograph. So, I chose ink, and by the looks of it, jewellery?




















This has to have been one of my favourite projects! Done in second year, we had to select an era - I chose the 50's, and a country - I chose Italy.
We then had to design a modern version of the national dress (Left), and a modern version of an iconoclastic garment from the era (I chose corsetry (Right)). Then the final task was to combine the two into a modern day outfit (Middle). It must be noted PLEASE that this was 1993 - so fashion has changed a lot since then, at the time this was a pretty cool design! : )
Heres a closeup:
Another class we had, probably my favourite was Creative Design. This is where we had to design our ranges and complete the technical drawings. The stage after this was to move to the pattern making room where we would construct the patterns, and then of course the final step was to sew the garments up, fit and tailor.

In this particular project, we had to randomly cut pieces of lycra out and then put them on the dressmaking dolls. We then had to look at the abstract shapes and come up with designs. Very fun and challenging. Often, these challenges were set without us knowing what the final task would be and only after you'd done something like cut ridiculous shapes and crazy cut outs would you be told - "time to make a design from this!"





Then, moving on toward the very end and early life and times as a designer in Cape Town I created some story boards. Heres a snippet:




So that's it - a very short peek into my portfolio from the past. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

Stay Safe,
Carmen.