Unit X: Dress and Draw the City with Sarah Easom

Today has been just lovely!

I must admit when received the equipment list for Sarah Easom’s ‘Dress and Draw the City’ workshop, I wasn’t too keen on lugging around a bag full of fabrics and drawing tools all morning. But since the Mancunian weather had decided for once to be....somewhat pleasant, it turned out to be very a nice workshop.

As it was a Friday morning, predictably there weren’t too many of us that turned up. So after waiting around for a bit for any stragglers we set off towards All Saints Park as our first location. Here, Sarah asked us to drape our fabrics and garments over any interesting objects we could find and begin to draw the silhouette that we ended up with. It must have looked rather bizarre from afar but this was actually quite a fun exercise! I chose to drape some silky, printed fabric over a tall stone and tried to create some sort of shape by twisting and knotting the fabric around it. Drawing wasn’t the easiest thing as I’m a little out of practice but I got into the swing of things eventually.

Meanwhile, Sarah came around to talk to us one by one, and when she reached me we talked about how to go about improving the design process through drawing from observation. She made a very good point about how it’s very difficult to design a garment without having a real object in front of you for reference; be it stand development or simply a piece of drape over a stone! Looking at my drawing, she suggested that I concentrate on shape and silhouette rather than just knotted detail of the draped fabric. Particularly, she pointed out how from my angle, the bag I had carelessly placed in front of the rock could form a silhouette detail as a portion of the garment that juts out. From this, I started to draw the bag with the aim to capture the differences in texture and shape between the tough hessian of the bag and the silky drape over the hard stone. I think there might be a general pattern emerging in my work as I am continually drawn to the interplay between fabrics and textures. This is something Sarah encouraged me to explore in the feedback to the previous project so who knows, I might be onto something!

But I digress.  We must have spent an hour or so at the park and only had time for one other location. It was suggested that we go to the town hall. At this point the sun had started to shine so I didn’t object to the walk. Especially since, despite having lived in Manchester for almost a year now, I still hadn’t seen Manchester Town Hall. When we got there, I was immediately taken by the beautiful gothic architecture of the building. There wasn’t a great deal we could drape our fabrics onto here but I decided to loop my fabric around some iron railings instead. Again, I was interested in the contrasting textures as the railings provided a tough structure whilst the fabric gave it softness and shape.

All in all, it has been a really nice day. It was quite a relaxed exercise but talking to Sarah in the informal setting has been the most helpful part of the workshop. My drawing definitely needs some development over the summer but after talking to Sarah I feel comforted knowing that I might be on the right track when it comes to learning how to design.

And now I am off to my home-town of Cardiff for a blissful bank holiday weekend!