Spotlight: 2d to 3d magic

'The Great Wave Off Kanagawa' from "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"; done 1823-29 is a singularly famous image from the Japanese artist Hokusai. It seems to rush forward in 3d off the page.. you feel the energy and the depth of that water whilst viewing it from only one 2d angle...

So below is a piece of prop making mastery.. capturing that wave and creating into 3d display that has all the joy and realism of the true wave. The precision of that vision and construction are flawless and you wish that this was a piece of sculpture for your home, not just a temporary display in a shop front.



Again, Hats off the VM's.

Tech: petal windows

I have just put in a silk petal window detail in our strand store:



The silk petals were bought in bulk on ebay, coming direct from china. They come in a lot of different colours and are quite sturdy and easy to use... The most time consuming part is separating the petals prior to beginning.

i found that you should lay down a wide double-sided sticky tape (you can get it at the art store), and then above this add thinner mounting tape. The double sided tape will allow you to remove the mounting tape without marking the paint on the window or leaving foam stuck to the window.

each petal goes on one slightly above the next, layered and in slightly different directions. to give a natural effect.

We began with red and moved up through pink and orange to yellow. We also chose to leave areas of the window blank to give the effect of growth and random chaos(like nature itself).

The window detail is very feminine, highly decorative and creates a strong sense of spring in the store.

We complimented the window by creating a carpet of petals around the foot of the mannequin and adding garden gnomes like snow white and the 7 dwarfs.

All in all a great and easy way to announce spring in store.

Musings: what do you do?

I was asked today how i would describe myself, what i do..

I said' i'm a display designer.' then, not satisfied, i felt the need to elaborate..
so i added something along the line of "im a window dresser, like in the olden days, i create the props, the scene, the moment in a display. I do the styling and the layout, the graphics and everything in between'
Thats seemed far more satisfactory..

I wish i could find a faster way to sum it all up, but i guess thats part of our glorious profession, in that it cannot be pinned down to one word. I see us like mercury, we fill the spaces between the people and the product, between retail and aspiration.. and the spaces between defined jobs like 'set designer' and 'stylist'.

I love what we do, i like the lack of glamour in the processes of what we need to do to make a display happen. I also like the magic once its all complete and looks so damned effortless:) I also love that i can constantly put on another hat (sometimes literally) and do a million small jobs that happen along the display process.

I think that to be a windowdresser you need to have a fearless certainty about your creativity, and not ask too many questions about where it comes from. I also think you have to want to find out about 'stuff' and 'strange' things and how to do something.. and also a love of plastic people.

I love the fact that it only lasts a month max and yet a good window keeps getting reactions even in a photo. I like the impermanence of what i do. It never boring. Not even on my $70 budgets:)

i like that, like today i can be having a bad day but at the end, i still have a great sense of satisfaction of a job completed:)

this is what a did today:) most of it is one long piece of string with no knots, just anchor points. there are about 4 other strings tied at their origin and end into the display, but then just looped around the original form to create the tensile areas:)


hope you are all having a good one!