Unit X - Thurs 8th March - Colour workshop with Hermes designer Leigh Cooke

Leigh was a burst of energy for an early start! He went into a long and interesting history of how colour was revelant to hs job and how he always like art and experimentation with colour, through to how it pays the bills in industry. 

He said that at school and college he barely paid any attention, yet when it came to art, his teacher would allow him to overlap lessons so he could finish his work. This landed Leigh a place at Man Met for his degree, of which he says for us to "dont worry about marks and just pass! its ideas they want, need and pay you for industry, take risks now, as long as it fits the breif as otherwise your work wont be creatively challenged. my ideas are interesting and thats why i'm here". 

Leigh has won awards in Shanghai, has worked a lot for Hermes and Ferragamo where he finds that his one design has appeared in up to 10/15 colourways and 8/10 fabrics depending on the source and country of retail. For instance, I found it very interesting that Germany likes muted colours plus creams and browns, whilst India prides bold bright colours to covert up the society issues and religious rituals. He is also currently working on a 2013 V&A collection which will hopefully open up a collaboration with the famous designer Paul Smith. 

From looking at his work after the session, i foudn it beautifully intricate like he explained. He said throughout his practise at university he remained quite an abstract designer, but this only made his work tighter and tighter with more detail. After just finishing a menswear and womenswear collection, he says that "designing is easy, its just the designers that make it hard work".

In the session, Leigh got us creating a colour swatch page to mimic how the industry would take your design (photo image we took) and take all the colours from it in order to create a screen print. High street stores would limit to about 5 colours whilst one of his scarves took 46 men with screens to create! It really showed me how industry takes a lot of care into manufacturing colour and how so many shades are in one piece. I really liked the exercise and ended up using the oclourways I created to produce my own print to possibly go onto a scarf!