Applying the FCP process

For our first group task, we were only told that we have to pick a colour palette from four choices, then once we picked the colour theme, we had to choose a sub category to focus on. The choice of colour palettes were complex colours, brights, pastels and neutrals. My team decided to pick the bright colour palette and focus on jewel tones.

Throughout this mini project, we followed the FCP process. This involves four main steps:

1.    Context – insight led strategy

2.    The Big Idea – creates an impact to achieve the stated aim

3.    Creative Concept – interpretation of the big idea

4.    Executions – finalised outcomes

Context

To start our research, we each created a pin board on Pinterest, mine was initially called “Brights - Jewels” collating all images that related to our colour story. I started to recognise that lots of interiors were showing up with jewel colours. Most of the interiors had a Mediterranean theme and reminded me of countries such as Morocco. Narrowing it down, I then focused on Morocco and interiors/architecture. I renamed my original board “Mediterranean Jewels” as we collectively decided this would be our theme. Whilst researching, I came across the Yves Saint Laurent house in Morocco, a couple of years ago I visited this house on a family holiday, I found it beautiful and peaceful.

I loved the colours of this house and we wanted to enforce the idea of “bright” jewels, using inspiration from the colours of the house – Moroccan Pop. 

I then created another board on Pinterest called “Kingdom of Morocco” which included other ideas that linked to Morocco, our colour palette and the house. For example, spices, markets, incense, tiles, mosaics and cactus plants.

The Big Idea

From the research, our aim was to use the colour palette with a combination of pop art and try to recreate a sense of Morocco.

 We came up with two main ideas:

1.    Focus on the architecture = use cactus (as this has been a key motif trend) to resemble the house, make the cactus colourful and experiment with composition

2.    Focus on markets/incense/spices = Inspiration from Sex and the City - Use spices combined with eye shadow to get the jewel palette and experiment with presentation

 Creative Concept

After having a peer discussion, we decided to combined the two ideas together, changed the colour of the cactus and got eye shadow/spices to sprinkle onto the paper, however, this looked too busy and complex so we needed to simplify our idea. We focused on YSL House and wanted the cactus to be our focus point.

 We then experimented with different coloured backgrounds and the composition of the cactus. To get the vibrant colours, we edited the colours of the cactus and the background on Photoshop. Altering the hue and saturation helped adjust the cactus to the tone we wanted and replace colour made the background stronger so they resembled the house and our ideal colour palette.

Execution

Finally, we got to our outcome and named the display “An escape to Morocco”

Photo Credit/Colour Strips - Chloe & Millie

Creating colour palettes

Still unsure on what route I would like to take within the fashion industry, I thought it would be a good idea to find out more about each role. I discovered a book called  "The Fashion Careers Guidebook" by Julia Yates which was very useful and had a very detailed description of what each job entails. The trend forecasting description was really interesting, currently, I have been learning about trends and i have enjoyed this so far. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to go into fashion but is unsure on what type of job they actually want to do.

Colour has a massive role to play in predicting trends. Using Photoshop, I selected an image from Pinterest and created colour strips to match the image, picking out all the colours that I thought were interesting and dominant. I found this task really fun, I did not realise how many colours were actually featured in one image. Below are my favourite colour palettes that i created using the images:

The first colour strip is selection - the colours that I chose to be part of my colour strip in a random order. The second strip is relationship - the colours in order, the order that I thought looked the best visually. Lastly, the third strip is proportion - changing the sizes of the colours (the more the colour appears, the bigger the strip).

Photo Credit - Pinterest