Enter the natural world filled with Kaleidoscopes!!

I started this project when I was a beginner at GCSE Art and Textiles. My broad theme was kaleidoscope, however, I chose to focus more on kaleidoscopic areas of nature and natural environments, including flowers, leaf prints and other patterns.

Like many Art or Textiles portfolios, I started off with a mind map and a mood board so I could explore subtopics that I wanted to have a look at in more detail. Then after choosing an aspect to focus on I took primary images of flowers or anything that I found inspiring or might want to work on later on. Then I responded to these images and ideas in my own ways. For example, sketching, drawing, embroidery etc. I collated all of these into my sketchbook pages and here is how it looked:

The artists that inspired my work in this project were Alexander McQueen, Victoria Villasana and Bethan Ash. I won’t go into much detail about their biography but their work is worth checking out. There are lots of ways you can recreate their work by adding your unique twist to it or using new techniques along with techniques that they used. These are my artist research pages:

The main techniques I used for this project were Tie dye, batique, monoprinting, hand embroidery, felting, sketching and colouring with colour pencils. At this stage, I was not really skilled at using sewing machines so I avoided those and tended to hand stitch on most of my work, however, I would suggest that unless you are making something that most definitely needs hand embroidery, you should try a sewing machine since it is much faster and would save a lot of your time and also the stitches are more secure.

And lastly, this was my final piece:

I basically picked a bit of every sub theme I focussed on and put it all together. The background is made with tie dye and batik wax. I learnt how to make flowers using hand embroidery by watching tutorials online and I made a bouquet with those. And finally I stitched onto pages from fashion magazines, like Victoria Villasana did. I wouldn’t say I am very proud of this piece because there are lots of other techniques that I could have used but the hand embroidery was fun to do and I did get a chance to enhance some basic skills.

So, that was my first Art and Textiles project. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and liked my work and if you have anything to share with me then please leave a comment below or send me a message.