On the first day we started with a tour of the campus, and an introduction to our course leader as there were a few different types of art summer courses they were leading. I was on the fashion and textiles one. Then to finish off our final day we created a mood board of our initial colour inspirations and thoughts for our mini-final piece.

The lady whom we had teaching us had previously worked as a fashion designer for big brands such as Channel, but I believe that she was now working in a smaller team on a start-up, but on the second day we were taken through tutorials of several techniques that she had sometimes used in the designing process and ideas that she used to further her thought process. We did some heat transfer printing and developed continuous line sketches. My two were of a parrot and the sort of shape that I was thinking about for the mini-final piece. This was the day that I became inspired by the idea of parrots and the colour scheme that I had created on my mood board. I had the idea of the Brazilian Carnival come to me as I remembered that the costumes you often see there are inspired by the indigenous bird species that live there.

On my final day, we got to work on our outcomes and as we didn’t have amazing amounts of time, I was creating a shoulder statement piece. I wanted it to be colourful and fun. In the end, as I didn’t have enough time to faff about with stiffening materials and things like Bondaweb I decided on using paper and a hot glue gun, as the idea for this was that it would be an initial design that you would develop into something more.

I enjoyed this course as it gave me time to experiment with shape and colour and allowed me to see that I was quite good at drawing.