Spring '12

...was a killer semester. I'm not sure if it's because I took on a sample knitting gig during the first month or so, or that the classes themselves were just much more demanding than I was expecting, but I felt like I worked my damn tail off, 24-7, for four months straight. But, no matter! Classes have been over for the over a month now. Since the end of the semester, I've been interning four days a week, taking naps, finally got around to watching The Wire, and stood up with one of my most beloved friends as she married her German sweetheart. What I have not been doing is updating poor, neglected Blog. I actually have a digital portfolio site up and running now, and that's probably where I'll be posting finished work from now on, but Sparrows and Honeybees will continue to exist for more back-end content, process photos and other bits and bobs that don't necessarily belong in something professional.

Advanced Technical Drawing


aka:

• Everything you ever wanted to know about rendering garments in Illustrator but were afraid to ask.
• How to make outrageously large files and influence the lab computers into crashing.
• Hopefully the last class I'll ever have to pull all-nighters for?

Whereas the tech drawing I course I took last semester was an introduction to sketching and rendering flats with Illustrator, in ATD we really started delving into the different things you can do to render materials, patterns, and hardware. Things started out simple, reviewing how to create pattern repeats for various types of patterns with Illustrator:

We moved on to embroidery. I was on a bit of a squid tear, as you can see!

We did a little tech pack for this assignment--here are the placement specs for the embroidery on this squiddish nightgown:

The focus of our midterm project was lace. Everyone did a small intimates collection so we could really show off our lace brushes and prints. Here's a little taste of the final product, the entirety of which you can view here.

Silk tap pant trimmed with lace, in "carmine."

After the midterm, we did an exercise using the perspective grid tool, resulting in a small handbag collection, and then it was a race to the end of the semester and the final; a winter athleticwear collection (aimed at either skiers or snowboarders) that included several branded items. I had already been playing around with the idea of a personal logo, and it was fun to take that and develop it into an actual print. The whole shebang c'est ca.

Branded accessory for Tricot L'oeil collection

ATD was a fabulous chaser for Tech Drawing I. Illustrator is such a deep, deep rabbit hole to fall down, and once you start really exploring what it's capable of, you realize that everything you thought you knew is really just the tip of the vector iceberg, and it is one in which I will happily get my ship wedged for hours at a time. I'm not eating any fellow crew members though; cannibalism is GROSS.