Trash to trend

Tallinn, two weeks of intencive course regarding trash, fashion and what we can do about it.
We went on a trip, not knowing really what to expect. There was very little information about the innovation camp, but thankfully it all cleared once we started the course. There were students from arounf five schools around northern europe: from Denmark, Estonia and ofcourse from Finland (us form Lahti and students from University of Lapland)
The course was an introduction to a ecological and ethical fashion that we, future designers could practice in our design and concepts. 

The idea was to divide into groups and design and produce in full scale or ½ scale a collection based on a given premise. My group had an assigment to design outfits using zero-waste technique and preproduction rollends. The whole class went on a trip to various estonian factories and manufacturers to get the leftover fabric for the project. It was beautiful. 
We left early in the morning from the center of Tallinn by bus. Just half an hour at the city limit we were surrounded by fields of frozen arable crops. 

On weekend, I had an opportunity to drag myself around the city. Even though the city is really familiar to me, it was fun just to go around aimlessly from one part of it to another or scout for new places with my classmates. One of the surprising places was Lennusadam. There was a Titanic
exhibition going on, which was actually very well built. It had everything from replicas of the cabins in the ship to huge ice walls. The ticket was great, each ticket had a name of pasengers of Titanic and
a short story, why they were traveling and at the end of the exhibition you could search for the passenger from a list to find out if they survived or not.

The course ended with a presentation of our concept and samples of what we had created. 
Our concept evolved into a japanese styled futuristic zerowaste collection. Our main look was hakama shorts and a padded vest as well as a couple of ½ scale designs. 

Violet and purple

Some illustrations that I have done. Mainly in purple because Saints Row 4 is a pretty good game.

 

Here's my character, Mr. President. 

More illustrations in here: 

http://gothfuu.deviantart.com/

The Netherlands Experience

Amsterdam in pictures. Well, mainly street art.

It was awesome.

Uni the Anthology 2---making of

Uni printing. Now this was interesting. It all started because we couldn't get answers from the print houses. It was a bummer. So we decided to do the job ourselves.
We have awesome printing equipment at school and very knowing people so it was in the end quite easy. We printed over 100 copies of the journal. Not everything went well, we made a couple on mistakes and had to fight with the stapler only so many times, but at least now we are ready.

Complete with twelve young talents work, this year was "nightmare" themed. They had complete freedom in creating their illustrations or one-shot comics and we had gotten a lot of awesome looking work. Most of the participants are from Finland, but we did have a canadian artist in this project too. I am very excited that this project did come out in time and is looking good. Hope that next part will be as awesome as this one was!

UNI2 the nightmares

We did learn that nothing should be ever left till the last minute.

Helsinki's comic festival 2013

Comic festival was a blast. it was my second comic festival selling at small print tent. I was sitting next to my friends Laura Heikkala http://heikala.deviantart.com/ and Petrushttp://kitchen-bitch.deviantart.com/
The weather was nice and warm, although it was really windy. But that is pretty normal in Helsinki.

 

I saw a lot of friends of mine whom I haven't seen in a while. Speaking of which, Wolf http://susiajasoraa.sarjakuvablogit.com/ was being interviewed on Sunday regarding his graphic novel "Miska pähkinä" about a transgender guy and his social experiment in Britain. It's a great novel and I recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Our UNI²  was on sale there too, as well as my mini comic "stupid comic 0" which is a compilation of one-page comics about stupid stuff and daily life.
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Material manipulation I

We had an awesome course of fabric manipulation at school, where we could test out some various printing techniques. Usually you see these techniques used in t-shirt prints, especially in the nineties.

We tested glitter print, flock/fuzz print and vinyl-like foil print. The flock print was hardest of these three, since you had to be very careful with the temperature and the use of glue. If the temperature of hot iron is not hot enough it will rip the transfer fuzz/flock or the glue might not stick to the flock. But after a while of practice it gets easier to understand what temperatures to use and how to attach the flock.

The foil print was the easiest one of the three. It works a bit like the flock print, but you don't have to be as careful with the temperatures as with the flock. The print surface comes out smooth and shiny.
The glitter print was on the other hand a bit of a mess, since it's just plain glitter that you spinkle on top of you pattern made of glue.

The only problem with these patterns are the fact that they are not durable. Patterns are almost gone after a couple of washes, which is a shame really. I guess there are some room for improvements to make regarding the textile glue, so that it could make a durable and washable, cool looking fabric.

We were asked to print a pattern of our choise on a fabric of our choise using one of these techniques.
I chose the classical japanese pattern called "seikaiha". It was originally a Chinese pattern that was designed to illustrate oceans and seas on maps.
It's not an easy pattern to print. Targeting was hell. I don't have a picture of the finished fabric, but a couple of pictures from the process.

UNI the nightmare poster

UNI is a project me and my friends started last year. It's a comic and illustration anthology from various artists. The first journal featured six Finnish artists (including my work) with their interpretation of the theme "dreams". That is where the name of the journal comes from, since in Finnish uni means dream or sleep.

Since the first journal was pretty successful, we decided to make it a continuous project. The new tome will revolve around nightmares and we have ten wonderful artists from various countries contributing in it. The journal will come out september 8th this year at Helsinki Comics Festival 

http://www.sarjakuvafestivaalit.fi/in-english

This illustration served as an alternative cover for the journal but will be featured as a poster. It was an awesome piece to make. I really haven't made detailed watercolor works before so it was somewhat a challenge on top of that it was supposed to be made in a couple of days. I used watercolor, acrylic paint and watercolor pencils on A3 watercolor paper. 

MIWA-teddies

These little ones were created to get rid of all the excessive fabric that was left over after my projects. I was getting annoyed by the amount of great fabric going to the trash. The pieces were too little to make anything out of them, yet still too big to throw away. I thought it was a waste to throw the fabric out so I came up with these guys.

I decided to call them "MIWA"- teddies. "MIWA" is an abbreviation of minimal waste as almost all the fabric goes to use. The bears are all different because of the limited amount of fabric and because they all look different, I decided to give a name to each one of them. Each of them also has a little scarf made out of leftover yarn to keep them warm  in the winter. 

Welcome to the blog!

Hello there!
My name is Broci and this is my blog about stuff that I do and like. I'm a fashion student and an enthusiastic comic artist from Finland. And although I have had other blogs before, I have never actually had a blog where I collect all my work and  study.. so this shall be one. 

I will write about my projects in fashion and illustration(comic) field, my process of thought and walktrough of some of the projects and designs I've been working on all this time and things I like. I love problem solving and designing and this blog will be like a portfolio diary of some kind. Be nice :>