Blog 4 – Peer Review
I read through Yanyu Pan’s blog post on fashion illustration and I enjoyed reading through how she really researched into the designer’s work, relating it to the better lives themes and finding reason to decide upon one of the designs for her final illustration. Within her blog, she focuses mostly on sustainability out of the main themes, looking into nature and environment themes of some of Alexander McQueen’s collections. Although she faced some difficulty with the drawing practice, it’s good how she learnt how the material she painted on is affected by her choice of painting medium. You can see how she has become more aware of her use of products and using recycled material, making her work more sustainable as she practices the illustrations.
Although for illustrations you’d normally want a clear paper to work on, I like the effect of the recycled paper underneath her piece. The writing and images showing through the negative spaces and areas of lighter paint creates an interesting effect to the piece, making it fuller and adding to the shading of the piece. It was nice to see her include photos of the work as it allows the readers to see and understand what is being described. This made me think that it could’ve been something for myself to have added within my blog post.
As somebody who isn’t as familiar with McQueen’s as others in this institution, it was interesting to read into her analysis of the designs. The theme of the dress strongly links to modern questions of environment and the ecosystem, and Yanyu has related this to the recent Earth Day. She also mentions the fashion industry and how people are working towards sustainability and social responsibility. This part was fairly brief and I would have liked to read some examples of how this is progressing. Additionally, with mentions to vogue interviewing women on challenges of fashion moving towards sustainable development, I was very intrigued and would have liked to read about examples of this too.
Her final illustration depicted the shape and body of the dress well, including the height and style of hair in the photo. In all of the photos you can see how watercolour has been the main medium with tissue paper in one of the practices. The blend of colours is smooth and suits the theme of water in the piece, but with watercolour being a very soft medium, it would be interesting to see how she could go about adding more texture to her illustrations, especially within the skirt element of the dress as it shows lots of volume and folds of overlapping material. Either with physical materials like the tissue paper, or with more practice into developing techniques to create different textures with the watercolours, it could really help to push the illustration forward. Overall, Yanyu has done a great job into reflecting upon her work in this Better Lives unit and has put a lot of research and thought into her creation.