PERSPECTIVE OF BLUE
Each detail of Edward Henry Potthast’spainting "The Alps" was brought to life in our garment design. The painting’s smooth blue tones and colors inspired our own color choices. The crisp shapes of the mountains are reflected in the geometric design of the bodice front. The small flowing stream led us to recreate a river-like accent flowing through the dress. Finally, we incorporated painting and embroidery to bring elements of the design and painting together.
Inspirations and design process
The inspiration of the dress is the colorway, the outline, and shape of the range upon range of mountains and the small river that is flowing in the painting. First, let’s talk about the colorway. The combination of cool colors and earthy warm tones give me a very clean and serenity feeling. We want to apply these colors to the colorway of our dress so that it perfectly reflects the colors of the painting. The light green and white that we added to the fabric and graphic design stood out from the blue tones of the fabric, not colliding with the deeper colors, but lighting up the design. Second, this overlapping effect of these mountains reminds us of layering, we also want to take these irregular outline and shape of mountains to show the feeling of a mountain in the design. Last but not least, is the river in the painting. Although it looks very small, it will be really interesting to capture this small detail and make the whole design more complete.
During the researching process, I was inspired by some black and white mountain illustrations. The paintings show the irregular lines and contours of the mountain, as well as the different heights and angles of the mountain. These lines gave me a lot of inspiration and I wanted to show them on my dress by sewing different types of stitches.
Hand Drawn Vector Illustration the Mountains. (2016, October 27).
For the choice of fabric, we are using heavy fabric like cotton canvas and stretch denim. This dress required weight and thickness to help us make the big triangle at the waist. These fabrics hold the shape perfectly and the edge of triangles looks really crisp. For the surface design, I hand stitch all the ombre lines with embroidery floss, they go well with all the mountain seams. For the large layered triangle chest decoration piece, we use very thick interfacing for it and all it holds perfectly. I have to say gravity is not easy to work within the garment making process. But I am happy to see how all the decoration pieces that need to attach on the dress hold and shape perfectly.
During the whole design process, there were lots of decisions and changes have been made. Also, some of the design element was the product of testing and the making process. We decided to keep them, and these unexpected changes work out well on our dress. When I first did the surface design, I wanted to show the color of the painting and the appearance of the mountain peak by switching from white to blue. But due to the lack of color, I wanted to add lines to restore the feeling of the mountain. The ordinary sewing thread was too thin, so I chose to fill in the contour of some mountain lines by hand sewing embroidery thread and used the embroidery thread from white to blue to show the gradual tone of the painting and add some texture. The whole process was not easy, but the different colors of the stitches made a nice contrast with the dark and light blue cloth, and the details were successfully extracted. I'm glad that I did some tests and changes based on the different effects of the cloth and thread while I was making it, and the results were good. As for the big triangle decoration piece on the chest, I finally made it through placing and matching again and again to show the feeling of overlapping peaks.