Fashion Illustration

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I started taking classes at Apparel Arts in May of this year. My goal is to obtain the Patternmaking & Design certificate, a 24 to 30 month self-paced program. The bulk of the program is a 3 hour weekly class in pattern drafting and design with 10 shorter classes such as Construction, Textiles, and Manufacturing. The first of the “electives” I took was Fashion Illustration.

As a former art student, the class was lovely. It opened me up to a new style of drawing,  introduced me to many fashion illustrators I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered, and got me into the habit of drawing more regularly.

The class used the text Illustrating Fashion: Concept to Creation by Steven Stipelman. It’s a really fabulous book if you’re interested in learning to draw the fashion figure. The class was structured to start with a short lecture which moved through the history of fashion illustration and ended with the work of contemporary fashion illustrators, followed by several hours of drawing.

Here’s some of my work from the 10 week class:

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10 head croquis
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Side Profile | Turned Figure
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Clothing the figure
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Rendering prints from multiple views
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Side profile practice
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Drawing from magazines
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Some exercises included copying Stipelman’s work
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Rendering texture with colored pencil
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Quick gesture drawings from magazines
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Rendering fabric prints
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Several figures on a page
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Ace & Jig muses
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Walking figure, rendering fabric
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More Stipelman inspiration
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Muse study (Nykhor Paul), several figures on a page
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Fashion face
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Silhouettes
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Sketching for finals

Our final projects required us to draw 4-5 fashion figures and create a corresponding mood board. I had a hard time designing my own line and chose to depict some of Vika Gazinskaya’s Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear collection.

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Work on the right is by Marialaura Fedi

Recent Reads

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Early in the year, I decided I was going to read mainly female authors, or books about bad-ass women. I think this idea to focus on women came from the extreme disappointment of the election. Who isn’t still feeling that.

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My favorites so far have been All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Towes and Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order).

I finished the book Charlotte by David Foenkinos this week. Charlotte Saloman was a German Jewish artist during WWII. She and her unborn child were gassed shortly after arriving at a concentration camp. It was a quick, depressing read, but introduced me to an artist I’d like to learn more about.

Up Next: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.

Any recommendations?

Here we go.

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Hello. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I should have a space outside of Instagram. But the problem is, I LOVE Instagram. It’s a form of expression that’s mostly visual. Creating and maintaining a blog feels like such a commitment. And the words. Oh, the words. However, I’m setting the intention of creating a space that’s sightly less curated when it comes to photographs, better documents my makes and what I’m learning, and helps me connect and interact with other makers and artists. Here we go.