BMW Warm Heart Foundation

Over the past couple of months I have been working on BMW warm heart foundation brief. The foundation has been set ip by BMW to provide funding and support for educational, environmental and Cultural Heritage projects. They would like the designs to portray uplifting and positive themes such as, hope, light, role models, looking up to elders, growth, helping, caring, realising dreams ect. I decided that I would focus on growth, caring and light, so the first images that came to my head were plants and flowers. We were told that we should create a certificate, thank you/new year card and two of the following; bag, scarf, keyring, iPhone case, mug, t-shirt.

I decided that I would start by looking at colours, as this is an important part of chinese culture and art, as different colours portray different things, such as yellow is sunlight, and growth and harmony, so I knew that this would be a good colour to chose as it goes with my themes. 

I then decided to look at flowers and plants as this would be the main image of my chosen theme. I found that sunflowers mean New Year, and yellow is a good colour. Bamboo is also a popular plant and is often symbolised with China and Chinese culture. 

I then started to draw sunflowers drawn from life, so I could draw from different angles and viewpoints. Next talking my initial drawing as inspiration I then started to break down the shapes and simplify the drawings, as I wanted to turn them into stamps. 

Drawing with Black Fine liner 

Stamps

I then wanted to look at backgrounds, and it was suggested by one of my tutors to try collage, collage is something that I have always been interested in and have produced in the past, however I have stopped making them over the past couple of years. I dived back into collaging and have definitely caught the collage bug again.

Here are a couple of the collages I made to create backgrounds with, I used paper, card, painted papers, and printed papers using silk screen printing. I knew that I wanted the colours of the backgrounds and the stamps to compliment each other, but also so the stamps stand out from background. I decided that I would stick to a colour palette of greens, yellows and blues so everything would compliment each other well. 

I then went on Photoshop to put the two components together. 

Certificate 

Tote Bags

Overall this has been one of my favourite briefs to date, although I was quite slow to start and get all my ideas and thoughts together, I was really pleased with the style, techniques, and the final outcome. I think that I have learnt a lot from this brief, most of all to sort my ideas out first, rather than going off and drawing any old think/flower and drawing lots of unnecessary things, it would be much better and much more productive if I got all my ideas and thoughts together first. I have also found an interesting way of working and feel as I could take this further and develop it more in the future.