Cultural Fusion: Peruvian Patterns

For this project I am fusing two cultures together to create one garment, hence the project title 'Cultural Fusion.' I have so far been looking at the Incan empire. The Incan empire was the largest in pre-Columbian America. The base of the empire was situated in Cusco, now Peru. I found a beautiful pattern in a travel brochure a few weeks ago, that I copied and have then branched off with my own ideas.

Peruvian Pattern From Travel Magazine

My own painting of the pattern

Inspiration

This weird little creature is by far my favourite part of the piece. It does look rather creepy, and dragon like, however he has certainly drawn my eye. I have proceeded to make a stencil of the design, a rather simple one, and have experimented with paints on paper and fabric.

I made this stencil by cutting the shape out of foam, and then gluing it to a cotton bud box lid! Very make shift, I should definitely have my own section on SMART or Art Attack. Simple as it may be it has proven to be relatively effective and I am rather pleased with my prints.

 As you can see above, the red and brown didn't really stand out well on the red fabric, so I think I will be giving them a miss next time. After the Paint experiments, I then decided to move on to bleach (the last picture) however as you can see, The red fabric doesn't seem to respond to the bleach as well as I had initially hoped. (Don't use best paintbrushes when using bleach, you won't have bristles left)