Tuesday 18 September 2012

Final Major Project (FMP): Part 1

I probably should’ve done a post for my Final Major Project  at college a couple of months ago, so here it is now, if a little late. It's in several parts, as I'm having trouble cutting it down and don't want to cram too much into your brains at one time!

The way an Art & Design Foundation works is during the first term you do what’s known as the ‘pathway’ stage, which consists of work that covers four specific areas of art: 3D, fine art, graphic design and fashion and textiles. In the second term, based on the work you produce in the first term and feedback from tutors, you select one of these areas to study. Your work develops over the next term through a series of set projects and group crits with tutors and other students in your group. All this experience you gain from your work (research methods, analysis of successful work, improvements, etc) is then concentrated into the Final Major Project, or FMP. It can be based on anything and you have six weeks to research, design, develop and produce a final piece of work. It can be a single piece, or a series of final outcomes.
I specialised in fashion and textiles, as I’m useless at drawing, not brilliant with Photoshop and I don’t get on well with the machines in the 3D workshop. But I am pretty nifty with a sewing machine. Nobody in my group knew I had experience working part time in a tailors and that I own six (yes, really) sewing machines, apart from the people who had been at my previous school. So when I was asked to do some fashion illustrations for the first project we did, I felt really conscious about the quality of my drawings. But when I was (FINALLY) let loose with some fabric and a sewing machine a couple of weeks later, I ran up a prototype of a jacket within a couple of hours and had other fashion people from my group coming up to me and saying “I can’t do that.” I was secretly thinking “yes!” Ok so I couldn’t draw well (still can’t really) BUT I could sew and that gave me a confidence boost when I found out a lot of people couldn’t. 
The next few weeks I spent fixing sewing machines for other students and completing projects, making garments where I could. An aspect that I did find a bit annoying was that (bearing in mind we were fashion students) we weren’t actually asked to make any finished garments, only prototypes from calico or paper patterns. When I asked why, the response was that this was a foundation course and it was the ideas you were graded on, not the finished product. I actually found this out after I’d completed my one of my final pieces- a jacket which I’d lined and finished how I’d been taught to finish a jacket in the tailors. I was NOT happy. Especially when I was told that I could’ve “stapled the seams together” rather than sewn them, and I still would get the same grade. I see this as a fault with the course, as fashion students are then sent off to university with next to no prior experience of garment making.

Part two of the FMP post is about how I tackled my own FMP and the first mini topic.

Monday 3 September 2012

Still here!

Apologies for the lack of post lately. Since FOTSN and Heptagrin Girl, it's been all go with uni, designs and summer holidays. I'm currently working on a post showing the final pieces I produced at college last year, but I need to cut it down by quite a bit as it's FAR too long! Here's a a few clues as to what my final project was about:

Richard Feynmann
Light
Entropy
Buckminsterfullerene.

Check back soon!