Friday, 24 January 2014

7 Virtues: Brainstorming & Research


I decided to create my character around Charity, as I saw a lot of opportunity for exploration. Particularly, the themes of sacrifice and salvation stood out to me as strong themes, and the idea of nobility was interesting because of the seeming contradiction of charity and lavish wealth. Although in the context nobility refers to the actions of the charitable, it was an aspect that warranted noting.


After brainstorming ideas, I decided to gather images for reference and inspiration, starting from the theme of guardian, something which I thought combined the ideas of salvation and sacrifice - being ready to give your life to give someone salvation. There are obvious religious parallels in that, however I decided to branch elsewhere, looking at nature and the charity that it provides to all inhabitants of the world, even at its own detriment (deforestation, landfill, etc.)

When researching natural clothes for clothing ideas, I came across Nicole Dextras' "Little Green Dress" project, in which Nicole crafted 21 dressed out of only plants and berries to highlight the issue of sustainability in the fashion industry. The range of colours and textures were particularly striking to me, and I plan on using them as inspiration for my own character.

When taking a closer look at Dextras' dresses, many of the berries and leaves have already started to decay, given the time taken to make the dresses. This brought my back to the idea of sacrifice through charity, and that nature, through our sustenance, is being slowly eroded. Alternatively, I could also pursue the idea of man-made products polluting the environment, perhaps incorporating imagery of landfill, deforestation, and the like into my character's clothes or body.

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