Collaboration Smart Works

(insert description of project)

The first task we did as a group was create a disguise out of newspaper. We decided to come up with a theme idea of venetian masks and then the idea of creating different facial extensions for each mask. We made a nose extension, ear extensions and eye brow extensions.

Smart Works:

main themes and ideas:

Growth:
Symbolisms for how smart works can help the women grow
plants, natural and beautiful symbolism for growth.
Text in the style of vines to go with this theme.

Butterflys:
shows change and evolvement. Coming out of the cocoon (confidence) coming out of your shell. Again beautiful however and feminine.

Symbolisms Of Women:
this charity is aimed at women and to make the art work more personal to the clients and relatable we decided to include suggestive shapes or symbolisms that relate to women. This idea of keep the connection to women merely suggestive makes it easy to move away from 'unrealistic' depictions of women that could have a reverse effect on clients and make them feel insignificant compared (e.g. beautiful model or drawings of beautiful slim women)

main concept areas of the smart works office that our group focused on took interest in and developed ideas for:

we moved the changing rooms more evenly either side of the window so that there was even space on the walls either side of the window for some prints (matching prints)

we decided that inspirational texts inside the changing room would be good as the changing room is usually the more confidence cracking part of the process if people are feeling bad about the way they look. (we can use our growth style text. 

Posters of the ends of the cloths rails to tidy up the appearance and brighten up the overall look of the changing and fitting area which would for most clients perhaps be the most confidence knocking part of the process. Look good feel good.

Also we decided we wanted to create an animation that ties all of ideas and works together either for the smart works website or to display in the office space depending on the situation, or even just for personal reasons. Again we want the same styles and themes involved. This way we make our ideas and inputs come to life.


Typography research examples:

Inspirational quotes

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you have imagined.” —Henry David Thoreau

 “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” —Dr. Benjamin Spock

“Happiness is the secret to all beauty; there is no beauty that is attractive without happiness.” —Christian Dior

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” —Buddha

“Always act like you’re wearing an invisible crown.” —Unknown

“Fall seven times stand up eight”

“Confidence is sexy”

“Happy girls are the prettyest” — Audrey Hepburn

“Give girl a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world —  Marilyn Monroe

“Never dull your shine for somebody else”  —Tyra Banks

"like wildflowers you must allow yourself to grow in all the places people never thought you would"

"there is no force equal to a woman determined to rise" - W.E.B Dubois

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you already are" Marilyn Monroe 

The road to confidence is paved  by daily accomplishments"




Colour Pallets:

i made some starting point ideas of what colour schemes to use by finding images that matched our main style ideas of elegant powerful and feminine:

Starting point research inspiration:

Butterfly and moth symbolisms to reffer to for this project:

http://www.insects.org/ced4/symbol_list1.html

Female, Femininity

The butterfly symbolizes female and femininity for a number of reasons. The “painted” beauty of most butterflies is analogous to the “painted” beauty of a high-fashion model replete with her cosmetic finery.In addition, the graceful walk of a woman compares easily with the gliding flight of a butterfly. A comparison between the lithe, beautiful, graceful butterfly with the usually less-showy, stubby moth might be interpreted as a comparison between woman and man; however, the moth has not become synonymous with men and masculinity.

Butterflies and women share the qualities of beauty, grace. Artists often include butterflies to introduce a feminine touch to artwork, product or advertisement.

Beautiful and Positive

The butterfly symbolizes that which is beautiful and positive because of the widespread and usually valid opinion that they are, indeed, quite colorful and beautiful. This position is strengthened by the opposing symbolism for moths being ugly and negative. Other symbolism assosiated with butterflies (like femininity, spring) also contribute to people’s high regard for butterflies.

Beauty of Nature

The butterfly is a multicultural symbol of the beauty of Nature, appearing in numerous examples of nature scenes of many artistic styles. Butterflies are included as elements of these scenes because they most effectively represent all positive characteristics of Nature.

Logic and prejudice has deprived moths of a similar status. Logically, since most “beauty in Nature” scenes are set in daytime, butterflies are the obvious choice for inclusion. The prejudicial lepidopteral impression that moths are ugly, negative, drab, troublesome (as a clothes pest) and undesirable, overpowers the fact that moths outnumber butterfly species many times.

Ugly and Negative

Shall mortal man be more just than God?
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?
Behold He put no trust in His servants;
And His angels He charged with folly:
How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust,
Which are crushed before the moth?

Although fantastically beautiful moths exist, many of them live in the tropics. Uncommon, beautiful moths such as (the Polyphemus, Cecropia, Luna) do reside in the United States, although commonly encountered moths are small and drab brown. Compare this to the many beautiful butterflies easily observed in almost any part of the world.

For this reason the moth always comes out second-best in a “beauty contest-opinion poll” against butterflies. Coupled with the stigma brought on by the misdeeds of the clothes moth, these little denizens of the closet are responsible for the tarnished reputation of moths everywhere. It is little wonder that the moth has become the unwilling symbol for that which is ugly and negative. Some of the other symbols identified with moths (like insanity) have also contributed to the moth’s position of low esteem.

PAISLEY VINES 

I wanted to at some point in the project include animation within our work to incorporate my course skills into the project. we found some animations with similar themes to our work and that could start inspiring ideas:

                                  

this is an inspirational animation we found that has a similar style to what we were thinking of using for our overall animation.

(use this idea but with abstract and merging images of women butterflies and nature then words of confidence boosting)

                                  


                                   

Deborah Klien:

Deborah Klein was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1951. She grew up in the inner  southern suburb of St. Kilda and lived and worked in London from 1973 - 1980. The experience of living in both of these places was to have a significant and enduring influence on her work.

The artist gained degree and post degree qualifications from Chisholm Institute of Technology, Melbourne and Gippsland School of Advanced Education and a Research MA from Monash University, Gippsland.

Klien is a good artists to look at as her themes and ideas are very similar to what our themes and ideas are for our project. She has used the representation of a woman figure however has not made the women look 'unrelatably' attractive as she has their heads turned or faces covered and so the removes the feeling of unachievable beauty from her work. 

Deborah's work focuses on exploring aspects of feminine persona, representation and identity. 

Acording to Inga Walton (author of behind beauties masks:works by Deborah Klien) she says that deborahs work is exploring the idea of revealing and concealing with regards to how much of ones persona and personality people ever (if ever( reveal to another person. This is why much of her work shows masks. 

Klein also states in an interview with NETS Victoria (a company that is a part of a network of touring exhibition agencies) that the women in her paintings masks were meant to be an extension of themselves. So the masks were essentially a part of the womens personality shown with different patterns and colours displaying their individualism. But it is as though this is concealing something deeper. 

She also states in this interview that the notion of looking over the over looked has been a central idea to her practice with the moth being a good metaphor of this as they are unfairly considered to be drab when they can actually be bright and beautiful. This could symbolise a hidden persona that is being overlooked in the women she is painting. 

Our work relates to this idea of hidden beauty with in a person and when thinking about the smart works clients. In our work we have related this to the inner persona of confidence and emotional beauty within the women and similar to Kleins work we have depicted this idea with the use of a butterfly mask. Our idea however was to have the butterfly instead of concealing a hidden beauty to be showing off this inner beauty and displaying it for all to see and symbolising women wearing their confidence and self love as their fashion and beauty. Kleins work also shows elements of ideas similar to what we have come up with as a group such as not revealing a full image of a woman or a womans body showing only hints of the body or hair as a reference for the audience to make connections to women. We decided to do this with our work also using only outlines of a woman or shapes or symbolisms to make the work appealing to all the clients and not depicting unachievable 'perfect' images of women. 

i cut out this shoe design that one member of our group had drawn and stuck it onto a blue background that was the same shade as the smart works logo. this simple delicate look is rather effective and relates to our theme as the item of clothing is suggestive of a woman and there fore relatable to the target audience but the shoe design is made up of flower shapes and butterflies. Both fitting in with our theme ideas. 

(adams women prints drawings)

after doing some drawings in the group to start developing ideas we decided to use two of adams drawings of women that he turned into digital prints. These drawings were inspired by our artist research of debora klien and her use of butterflies over women faces, we liked how this in a sense symbolised wearing confidence as fashion which are two things that relate to smart works and that smart works would want to portray as they want to influence confidence and happiness and security for there clients but also want to show clients that there is an element of fashion and retail pampering involved with the free fitting of a full out fit and accessories for the women as well as make up. 

we delegated roles to work towards making these drawings of women into screen prints on fabric as we decided that this would be an elegant feminine way of displaying our work and would fit in well near the fitting rooms and the curtains of the fitting rooms etc. 

we decided that me and heather would draw up a number of different butterflies to use on the women face so that there was a combination of our drawings all present in one piece. 

these are the butterflies me and heather drew to use on the prints for the women to place around their face. 

Deciding how we would go about making the screen prints as they would be rather large:

we booked a meeting with kiran the screen printing technician so see how we would go about print images as large as we would need them. 

after having the meeting with kiran we found decided that the best way to go about this would be to project the images onto a wall and draw onto tracing paper around the outlines of our images in attempt to make a large template for the screens.

(shading in the block colour for the butterflies, with the layer of the outline underneath on a separate sheet of tracing paper) 

for each of the women we made three layers of tracing paper templates as we were going to be using 3 colours for our prints (black for the outline squinting for the face and blue for the butterflies) to do this we had to shade in on each tracing paper sheet where the colour was going to go (e.g. we had a sheet that showed the shaded shape of the face, a sheet that showed the shaded sections of where the colour would be on the butterflies and a sheet of just black outline. 

(shading in the black colour for the face)

This is what our screen for the first woman looked like for the black outline. We placed this over our fabric and scraped paint across the length of this screen which pushed paint through the sections of the screen that had the holes of the outline shape in it. 

we did however encounter some problems when screen printing these prints as the main layer for the colour of the face was out of proportion, and so the outline screen did not match up with it. 

we decided that the best thing to do would be to leave this skin tone layer out all together as this would create a more aesthetically pleasing finished piece and we did not have the time to make another screen as it took a while for these ones to be made (just under two weeks) and we were running too close to the deadline date. 

Making The Typography:

we decided to use one of the quotes we looked at earlier in the project and decided on Aaudry hepburn's quote "Happy girls are the prettiest" as it is an inspirational quote that suggests that physical and outer stereotypical beauty is not the most important quality and that happiness is the most important thing for the clients and the most beautiful. The women that are going to Smart Works are on the road to self fullfilment and a personal journey of starting to love themselves and find self acceptance and self confidence. This quote goes in hand with the message that smart works is trying to portray. 

i drew up the outline of the quote we decided to use first in pencil in my sketch but which i would then trace over in illustrator to make a digital outline that i could work with.

this is the outline i made after tracing it in adobe illustrator and filling it in on photoshop. We were thinking of making a vinyl cut out of this however we decided that for the exhibition we should make it more of a display piece and colour it as we would have to stick it in the exhibition room instead of the area it was intended for in smart works. 

after filling in the lines i then added the butterfly and roses to create a more floral effect on the text and make the text look more like it was a part of plants and emphasise our main themes of growth and butterfly. the butterfly is present to represent freedom and growth and femininity. I used a drawing i made of roses and vines for the flowers and leaves i have added in this piece and one of the butterfly i drew and then coloured them pink to give it a feminine pretty effect.

i used this drawing i made in my sketch book for the leaves and roses in the typography to emphasise the floral vine style of the font inclusion of the plants and growth theme. I also used one of the prints we made of the butterflys. I drew this image first and then edited it in photoshop to look more like a stamp print. 

Font i created was inspired by Mathilde Castle land by Maelle. k and Thomas Boucherie

                            
This is the finished piece i made for smart works of a woman with butterflies around her symbolising freedom and confidence. We used the colour blue for the butterflys to relate to smart works and smart works being the means of confidence. I drew this woman in pencil first and then in photoshop coloured it and added images of the butterflies me and heather drew and also coloured them in photoshop. I drew the womans head looking up to represent confidence as this is the body language used to represent this but also to show freedom and serenity "feeling the wind in your hair" type of feeling to it. The butterflies and wings especially of the butterflies as well as this idea of breeze in the womans hair represent flight which is also offend associated and connected to freedom.

                                          
I used the golden sector in my image to create a main focal point of the womans face and to make the image more aesthetically pleasing. The face is the main focal point as it shows the idea we had of women wearing their confidence as their fashion the butterfly being worn proudly on the womans face showing how her confidence and independence is what makes her beautiful and that she wears it proudly.

This is the image heather drew before we put it into photogshop and coloured it to go as a set with my drawing of the woman. The girl in this drawing also has a butterfly over her face and she has used the same rule of the golden sector in her drawing to draw attention to the girls face. 

This was one of the versions for my pice i made before arriving at my final choice i showed earlier. The floral background is too full on in this piece and draws too much attention away from the main idea of the image and so i toned it down in my final pice. Also the final piece i made the background pink as this is more feminine and relatable to the target audience.