Formative Review Highlights

Formative Review Highlights

by turquoisecho

We were asked to take notes and review four people’s work we liked.

Zoe Brown: Her art was really interesting.

The colours and ideas behind this fashion design really took me. The circular shapes and the use of old records are pleasing, and I like that they get larger below the waist to create the overall shape of the garment.
The rest of the records have been used here. You can see the waist shape and the tailored top half of the dress. It borderlines abstract, but you can clearly see a garment in the shapes.
Her sketchbook had lots of collage work like this. It was very experimental and she took things to quite a depth.

In relation to my work: Zoe’s work is a little more experimental than mine. While she seems to prefer fashion, I gravitate to illustration, but the lesson learned is the same. I’d like to collage a bit more, if only to generate ideas.

Sharon Bradford

Her reflective journal is teeming with life!
Her sketchbook is filled with brightly coloured work like this. Here, the circles and curved lines give the illustration an organic feeling I love. It feels like plants are bursting out of the circles.

In relation to my work: her work is quite similar in feel to mine – that is, bright colours and an illustrative quality. Her stream of consciousness and the quality of documentation in her reflective journal is definitely something I’ll try to learn from. The fold-out parts of her journal made me smile: I can’t resist something physically interactive.

Zaina Abbas

In my notes, I’ve described her work as something that reminds me of a Hammer Horror film, or Rocky Horror. The nauseously busy and bright colours are almost flamboyant, and I love the style.
Look at the layering here! I feel like I need to attach her brain to my brain, because I honestly can’t compute creating something like this.

In relation to my work: What I really need to do is start working with other material that already exists. This idea of layering things and mixing original art with photographs and prints is something I’ve been needlessly reluctant to try out. In addition, you can’t help but see Zaina in these pages. This style is wonderfully personal.

Katherine Hughes

The bright, blocky yellow with black liner over it works incredibly well here.
Katherine clearly has an advance perspective on shapes. The teal brushstrokes and the idiosyncrasy of the black doodles on top are really pleasing to look at.
Her “Miniature people” house.

In relation to my work: What I was most impressed with was the amount of imagination that went into Katherine’s Miniature People survival kit project. She’d created a whole world and I am COMPLETELY taken by it. It’s the kind of imagination you’d see in a writer.

I do love genuinely inspired ideas like this. If I’m passionate about something, I make good work. Maybe I should e-mail her and see if she wouldn’t mind taking the idea a little further with me…

I’ll leave you with a quote I can’t stop thinking about from another student’s work. Unfortunately, I don’t have the source.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

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