Evaluation

William Morris & Co Evaluation

for the past few months I have been working on the William Morris & Co project where we had to somehow combine his work with an artist of our choice.

 I chose Peter Blake as my Artist. He works in a pop art style, producing vibrant quirky pieces of work and he also produced an album sleeve for The Beatles Sgt Pepper album.

For my primary research I got some wallpaper samples from B&Q to give me some ideas.

All my research was done on the internet and knowledge I already knew about William Morris. I took a lot of pictures from Peter Blake’s official website and pinned pictures on my Pinterest board which I then printed out and used in my sketchbook and sheet work.

I took inspiration from William Morris’s birds and his quirky looking flowers as this is my favourite part of his work. I originally wanted to add Peter Blake’s drawings of The Beatles to one of his flowers and try and combine the two but then I decided I’d settle with William Morris’ designs but in Peter Blake’s colours as I thought it would look better.

I’ve always liked pop art with how expressive and different it is to any other types of art work, which is why I chose Peter Blake. His work is quite psychedelic with all the vibrant colours he uses and because he produced work for The Beatles, it has that 60’s feel to it which I love. I also thought with William Morris’ old fashioned style work and then pop art being quite a modern day sort of art, it would be a challenge to combine the two.

Throughout the project I have experimented with lots of different techniques such as; puff binding, collage, tracing on a large scale, coda tracing, weaving, dying fabric, mixing dye to make my own colours. My favourite technique is puff binding because it looks so cool when you put the heat gun over the print and it all puffs up like popcorn.

(Health and safety)

My peers gave me feedback on my work with where to improve, such as; using weights on my screen when printing so my screen doesn’t move and my design comes out more precise. They told me whether to use fabric or wallpaper and ways to make it look effective and, their overall opinions.

I took on board David’s comments about what direction I should take for my final piece, however I didn’t use them in my final piece. I took the ideas and used them in some designs in my sketch book but I couldn’t adapt it to the work I had already planned out.

I’ve found this project challenging because I’ve never done anything like this before, it took me a while to know what I wanted to do and which artist to pick. However my strengths have been, updating my blog a lot more often, taking the time to research my artist and produce some detailed sheet work.

We had a design meeting for textiles to decide what our final piece would be. It was a choice between creating wallpaper or a meter of fabric. My group decided that I should do a meter of fabric with my William Morris repeat pattern on in puff binder as they felt this was my strongest sample and it would look good on a big scale. I found it difficult to print accurately on paper as the image didn’t print fully, and the colour often looked too light.

Overall I found this project challenging and quite stressful. I enjoyed experimenting on fabric and producing my mood boards, research sheets and artists’ sheets but when it came to actually designing my final piece and printing with my screen, I found myself rushing. I didn’t manage my time as well as I could have. I took too much time trying to come up with a design that when it came to actually printing onto my fabric, I had 2 days to wash, press and print on my meter of calico. My design didn’t come out quite like I wanted it to, the puff binder got everywhere and I didn’t line up my designs right so it wasn’t equal. However I am proud that I managed to finish all my work on time for the deadline and it was to a good standard.