Year 10 GCSE Textiles students enjoyed an extraordinary day of creativity with a workshop from fashion illustrator and artist Elyse Blackshaw, the first time such an event has been held at Colfe’s.
Among her expansive repertoire of work, London-based Elyse creates dynamic real-time art through fashion illustration. Her work embodies fluid lines and demonstrates an instinctive use of mark-making to capture fashion, portraits and lifestyle. She uses a range of mixed-media to layer and alternate textures, and her workshop saw students explore mark-making, patterns, drawing, colour, creative face-drawing and collage to create their own vibrant fashion illustrations.
The students embarked on a dynamic and thoroughly modern journey through mark-making and line illustration, playing with layers and textures, drawing faces, creating small-scale 3D mannequins made of scrunched up scrap paper and scraps of textiles, through to creating large-scale mannequins. Elyse encouraged the young creatives to be as playful as they liked as they drew faces and figures and created their mannequins, resulting in some wonderfully quirky, stylised and exaggerated features.
Lead Textiles Teacher and workshop organiser Melanie Way said, “It was a hugely successful day for Y10 Art Textile students, who thoroughly engaged with the workshop, immersing themselves in it completely. They built on their drawing and observation skills as well as 3-D textural awareness. Feedback from all of them was overwhelmingly positive, and they were totally inspired by it. A huge thank you to Elyse for an absolutely sensational day.”
The current Year 10 students are the first to embark on the new Textiles GCSE course offered by Colfe’s, following the establishment of the new overarching Creative Art and Design Faculty which, alongside Textiles GCSE, also offers Three-Dimensional Design GCSE and A-level options.
