As part of my final Harlequin Doll costume for FMP, I am looking to create my own pattern repeats that put a contemporary twist on the traditional, diamond harlequin repeat...
So far I have been doing visual and written research, looking into the history and origins of the Harlequin as well as different interpretations from movies, ballets, etc. I've also looked into artists that have utilised the harlequin print/style in their designs to inspire my own personal interpretation. Examples include Dior and Armani Prive, amoung other costume designers such as Heather Picchitino.
From research as a starting point, I have begun to pick out shapes, colours and ideas that mesh both elements of the traditional repeat with more modern styles.
I wanted to look at traditional ways of printmaking and so have looked at experimenting with things like acrylic paint, water colour and oil pastels, here are some of my results so far which have been curated by repeating and mirroring scans of my experiments...
This first repeat was initially done in watercolour, and the way I curated it was to make a diamond shape template to the desired look I wanted and to theme trace this out numerous times in my repeat format. I looked at how I could curve the edges of the diamond shape to give it a little variety, again, looking back to research for shapes inspiration. In terms of colours I was quite inspired by the more contemporary work of Armani Prive as I loved the contrasts she drew between sharp black areas and areas of bold colour that really enhanced the diamond shape. In my own repeat, I love how the darker areas actually seemingly create new shapes, figures and repeats in the way everything is laid out, for example, there looks to be diamonds in a variety of sizes and the black areas create almost flower like shapes in-behind and so I find the pattern quite interesting to look at.
From my original print, what I have then done is to look and see how I can digitally manipulate it to make the pattern even more varied and intriguing - digital manipulations also meant I could look at different colour schemes of the same repeat, etc. which worked quite well. My favourite version of the repeat would definitely be the third one as I love how it overlapped and meshed shapes and figures to create something which felt a little less rigid and simply more fun and playful.
This original repeat was inspired by research into existing nutcracker ballet harlequin costumes, taking shapes, colours and figures to then combine into my own repeat. I was inspired by trims on the dress to give the diamond shape this sort of trim like effect which I think is quite fun and effective. The circular shapes also feel quite jester inspired. I really like how bold and striking the colours look in this repeat and I've further looked to manipulate it digitally to look at changing of colours, etc. for different outcomes. I quite like the results of this repeat, however, I am wondering if it maybe feels to close to the original diamond repeat so I'd like to keep developing and pushing ideas from here...
For this repeat, I wanted to have a look at how I could curate something more digitally, as obviously, when working with geometrics, accuracy is so important and I thought, perhaps, this could be better achieved digitally, however, to me that meant I ended up curating, again, something that felt a bit too rigid and structured and perhaps a bit too similar to the original, structured harlequin repeat.
Although I like the repeats curated here, as they feel uniformed and neat, I think that, in order to create something really new and original, I'd like to work by hand to see what I can come up with.
Here, I again looked at darker contrasts inspired by Privé's work, and some of the colours were inspired by Dior looks. I quite liked some of the varying black lines in one of Dior's harequin inspired looks and so this sparked the idea of perhaps having a striped background in-behind the diamond repeats.
Again, I think some of the contrasts in the pattern are quite fun and playful and I like the more contemporary use of colour, however, I don't think this worked as well as it could have, because, when it came to repeating the pattern, the stripes and dimamonds ended up not lining up or reacting so well and this could've been to do with the scale of the initial experiment, however, I otherwise think the stripes look quite distracting in-behind so I didn't really want to develoup this idea further forward.
This final repeats was inspired by an image of a harlequin look seen on Pinterest and the shapes felt quite inspired by the traditional jester look, where you have these much more rounded diamond shapes and I was able to combine these ideas with some of my drawing work done through research, looking at the traditional jester. I was also really inspired by the cohesive, pastel like aura of colours in the image I looked at and so tried to incooperate this and I like how soft yet playful the colour combinations feel. Because the colours were so soft, I felt that I needed some sort of outlines to make the shapes sharper, and so I looked at using a black finer liner to create these playful, stitch-like outlines in combination with hearts at the point of each diamond as jester diamonds normally have circles or bells at the point of the shape so this was looking at how I could take and alter this idea.
I think the overall outcome of this repeat is really fun and unique and doesn't look like something I've seen before, however I'm not sure if the colours would work so well for the specific look I am going for so maybe I could look, again, at manipulating colour digitally.
I am looking forward to continuing to develop my harlequin print ideas forward as well as into design ideas. I think my initial experiments have worked quite well to start to look at modernising and making the pattern my own.
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