Like all educational institutions, this past March my school (Savannah College of Art and Design- SCAD) announced that the remainder of the 2019-20 school year would be online due to COVID-19. This meant that my last quarter of my senior year of college, I wouldn't have access to the wonderful facilities I had utilized throughout my senior thesis. As the world adjusted to the pandemic, so did my fellow students and I.
I had grown so accustomed to the facilities at Pepe Hall (SCAD Fibers' Building), specifically the dye and screen printing labs, and the Wacom tablets in almost all of SCAD's academic buildings. To find out I no longer had access to them for my very last quarter was extremely disappointing. I had to rethink my plan for the rest of my final college portfolio.
One of my original plans was to screen print scarves I had designed back in November. The Romanus Scarf Collection: four color screen prints with about 6 overprints, consisting of two 36" square scarves and four 2"x35" skinny scarves (pictured to the left). Now, that's quite a lot to screen print, as I had access to only four 3'x4' screens at a time (that's why these were only set up to be four colors). With this in mind, I really was only planning to screen print one design. But alas, even that wasn't going to be possible without access to the studio. However, out of that loss, I realized an opportunity presented itself:
I had gotten a couple of good ideas from the critique of these designs back in November so I decided to revisit those and redo the entire collection, this time for digital printing, rather than screen prints. I was fortunate enough to get a Wacom tablet of my own! This allowed me to add gradient effects, drawing straight into the design rather than struggling to with my laptop's touchpad or a mouse. The final redesigns and colorways can be seen here. I bought a digital mockup set from Creatsy to present the designs as square and twilly scarves in my portfolio, as I didn't get the chance to print them during the quarter. (I have, however, started sampling now but more on that later.) In the end, I'm very proud of the results from the redesigns, so for this project at least it worked out!
Also because of COVID, I moved out of my student housing and into a sublease (still in Savannah) for the end of March to May. I didn't know my roommates and stayed alone in my room for most of quarantine. I still had friends in Savannah but didn't see them much due the still busy schedule of the quarter. My mood wasn't very good and my anxiety was at it's peak. I got waves of paranoia mixed in with terrible feelings of loneliness. I started to alleviate these feelings by trying to get out of my apartment more often. Nature was the best mood lifter. I'd go to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge. They have a 4 mile wildlife drive around a wetland environment. Perfect for quarantine; you didn't have to ever leave your car. The joy of counting how many gators I could spot and watching the cormorants, egrets: birds that had always inspired me, instantly helped. I also started going on walks to Forsyth Park; enjoying the look of the palmetto trees along the way and sitting down on the grass to sketch.
Creating art brought me the most joy, as it always does, but it especially helped me then. Back in my room, I'd do my daily practice, most of which were a summation of my feelings at the time. The sketches pictured to the left, show my anxious feelings through a mix of loose and stiff lines, meant to look chaotic. The palmetto leaves were a response to calm, refreshing feelings from my walks to the park. These led me to my last project; the "Pleasant Thoughts" Print Collection, a personal and direct response to quarantine.
Even though I had the Wacom tablet, creating an entire print collection digitally would've taken a bit longer than usual. It had to be plugged into my laptop to use it, and my laptop wasn't handling the big, hefty Photoshop files (PSD and PSB) so well. While designing the scarves, one of the PSB files had crashed. I didn't want to deal with more technical issues like that, so I thought it would be fun to do this last project completely by hand, with a technique I learned in the first class in the Fibers' curriculum. (Click here for instructions on that technique). Below are some time lapse videos of me creating the repeats!
Throughout school I had developed a bit of a typical process for developing a collection, so it was quite interesting to stir up the pot a bit. Instead of drawing a bunch of motifs then simply arranging them in a repeat, I drew straight into it, which is something I hadn't tried in a while. I used a variety of media including pencil, acrylic paint, sepia ink, water soluble graphite pencils, and gel and ink pens. The collection ended up consisting of one main print that was an 18" square repeat, and three smaller repeats, with a focus on texture instead of motifs. In fact, the only clear motif was the palmetto leaves. Like in my daily practices, they symbolized hope and positive thoughts, while the textures and chaotic lines were representative of the negative ones.
All in all, it was a fun experiment to go back to traditional media to create an entire collection with. It's something I may revisit in the future. You don't see this print collection in my portfolio though, as it was a bit of a struggle to clean up its presentation. I didn't have a very good scanner in my apartment and simply taking pictures of them ended in the presentation you see above. However, it is something I'd like to revisit in the future.
After finishing that project, the remainder of the quarter was spent on my other classwork, refining my portfolio, and doing some personal work to keep myself sane. At the end of May, my school had a virtual graduation ceremony for us. The Fibers department, especially, did an awesome job trying to make the end of our year as celebratory and as close to how it would've been as possible. It really showed how incredible the department is and how much they truly care about their students. I'll be forever grateful to the Fibers faculty for making the most out of the situation and for such an incredible time I had in the program in general.
Despite all the set backs and disappointments, school during a pandemic turned out to be a memorable and interesting experience.
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