hacker girls

"- retreating into personal worlds
isolate themselves from society"
sketchbook collage

Got these jeans for £10 at a sample sale, the fit is a bit weird and they're missing a zipper pull, they were probably considered defective factory seconds and put into the sale pile but I think they're the perfect candidate for a new pair of crust pants...

Not for everyone??

The finish on the denim doesn't show up too well in photos but it reminded me of this suit Tadanobu Asano wears in Ichi the Killer:

The idea of "high fashion crust punk" is both humorous and interesting to me but the relationship between luxury fashion and punk has been fairly transparent ever since "punk" was even a thing, largely during Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's SEX/Seditionaries/World's End days, it entered public awareness visibly, through fashion tied to music. There's something appealing about the fact that even the roughest DIY is more personalized and handmade and unique than most luxury items, and luxury items are considered precious and sacred. I like the idea of customizing and personalizing things that are treated as untouchable, not being afraid of the illusion of luxury, commit sacrilege against capitalist dogma and customize something with luxury value even if that means slashing it up, if that will make it more wearable for you. I suppose it's in that spirit I'm encrusting these Versace jeans (even though they were cheap and it's just a diffusion label) and making them into something I'll actually wear.

I'm patching them with free samples from fabric stores, so they will end up being made of some luxury fabric like this silk brocade (£70/m) at no cost to me. Now they just need a few hundred more hours of work...

changes over time

I found the above old sketches from the start of the year and decided to finish them off and ink & paint them, the result is really boring to me. These illustrations look slow and careful but still sloppy, they're impersonal. It's a bad sign to be bored by your own work but I think it's positive because how I draw and what I want to draw has changed so much in the past 6 months.

Composition of sketchbook sketches and print design from about halfway through the school year

I feel a lot less restrained when I draw now, I'm having more fun and am able to get ideas out more quickly, it's so important to keep a sketchbook to scribble in whenever. Drawing fast and simply helps create a visual shorthand that can be (hopefully) developed into an improved style. Visual communication itself is a form of language, it continues to be refined as our visual vocabulary grows, it feels natural for it to be dynamic and changing as we try to find our "voice". Some recent quick sketches from my small notebook:

Various Species of Magnolia

Drawing flowers can be quite relaxing.

Went to some nice fabric shops in Soho, looking for mostly silk brocades and raw silks. I got them to cut me some free samples which are actually the perfect size for something I'm working on...

I really like to draw food.

Older project, I tried drawing a base body and garments on separate paper then using photoshop to automate the illustration process to save time...bad idea haha.

Unit 7 Exhibition

My final project in CSM Foundation's exhibition, I really should have taken better photos but I was so tired of seeing this stuff by the time it was finally up and on the wall, I was just glad to be done. Now that I've finished this project (and the course I was on) I'll continue using this blog to post whatever I'm working on or finding interesting.