ALANKAARAM

I chose the theme of Folk Tales. Folk tales as a theme interested me as it reminded me of childhood stories. As I started mind mapping on the topic I came up with words like ‘Narratives’, ‘Culture’, ‘Heroic characters’, ‘Mystic’, ‘Magical’, ‘good over Evil’ . I was interested in two key words ‘Mixed creatures ‘and ‘Good over Evil’. Indian culture was the area I wanted to focus on. It is rich with many fantastic creatures which gives me a lot of material to work with. So I began researching and reading about hybrid characters in Indian mythology. Hanuman came across as a very exciting character, as I started reading more about the different stories I associated words like ‘ Devotion’, ‘Force’, ‘ Heroic’, and ‘ Mischievous’ to him. Through my mood boards I tried to show the attributes associated with him, but it became too literal and the mood boards failed to justify the theme.

I then moved on to look at ‘Behroopiyas’- devotees who dress up as gods for different occasions. I looked at Behroopiyas of Hanuman mainly looking at - ‘Decorated costumes’, ‘Color’, ‘Make up’, ‘Processions’, ‘Performances’ etc. I got interested in the makeup aspect where the faces of these people are painted with bright colors and patterns and a lot of emphasis is given to their eyes. This led me to look at face painting and costumes in folk dances especially of Kerala example- ‘Padayani’, ‘Theyyam’, ‘Ottamtullal’, ‘Kathakali’ as all these dances have elaborate costumes and detailed face makeup. Finally I decided to focus on ‘Theyyam’. The makeup in this folk dance involves face and body painting with different sorts of costumes made of leaf and cloth and differs with the deity being depicted. In this dance form as the performer wears the costume, he enters into a trance and becomes the deity he portrays. The dance is devoted to lord ‘Shiva’ and is performed at ‘Devi’ temples as an offering to gods. Costumes are mostly dominated by red, green and silver. The aura that the performance creates and the mystic mist of colors it renders makes it a magical experience to the viewer.

URBAN CHAOS.

MIND MAPS

FINAL MOODBOARD

SOME SKETCHES

FINAL PATTERNS

SCREEN PRINTED FINAL SWATCHES

FINAL GARMENTS

TAGS & PACKAGING

Tangled Wilderness

Mindmap:

Themes:

Final mood board:

Wilderness was my project brief. In my initial mindmap of the word i came across jungles, raw, tress, unmanageable. The word wilderness can be understood in two ways- in can be associated with the emotion of wild or can be associated with an aspect of nature. With wild as an emotion i looked into urban jungle, unruly crowds,etc. And working with wilderness in nature I came across certain opposing concepts barren unkept land/ dense forest, simple/complex mix, etc. which are both accosiated with wilderness. The opposing concepts intersted me and therefore I choose to work with wilderness in nature. Taking a few words like untamed, organic, tangled, simple and dense from my initial mindmap I branched to create a new mindmap which gives us an idea about the relations between these words.
I also looked up quotes and poems which gave me insight into other peoples understanding of the word wilderness as well. One of the quotes “The wilderness needs no defence, it only need defenders.”- Edward Abbey; stuck with me and I used it as an inspiration for some of my mood boards. As the next step I picked few words for themes and looked up images on the net. I then chose tangled as my main theme and used words like negative/positive, chaos and organic shapes as inspiration for my moodboard. I took pictures of nature and combined them with images taken from the net to create my moodborads. I used layering to create a sense of chaos and tangles. My final moodboard is a combination of two earlier moodboards. The colour palette of the final moodboard has four sets of colours. The first set is pastels, the second set is greyscale and the third and fourth are warm colours.