ILLUSTRATING MEN

Men.. I am one, I know other men, but I have never drawn one until tonight.

As a fashion designer I've always drawn and illustrated women because that's who I designed for, this past year I've been working hard on refining and improving my skill illustrating women. But now I have a new challenge, when I return to University I will be doing menswear so obviously that means I have to illustrate men.

This is my first attempt, I think it's alright for my first go. Obviously men's bodies are very different from women's, they're much blockier and with a lot less curves. So I tried to draw a convincing male body, not too muscular.. didn't want him looking like a body builder! I really need to learn how to draw hands, feet and faces.. those are my big 3 illustration 'let downs'.

I will be practicing a lot more and will just keep drawing until I find a style that I'm happy with! I am trying to experiment with a more sketchy/loose look to my figures and working with messy shading as you cans see above. I used a picture of the Moon's surface for the jacket print which I put in on Photoshop, I will always complete my illustrations digitally, I think it's my signature.

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FASHION VISUALIZATION

Things have been quiet here for the past couple of weeks, apologies but I have been working non stop. Monday I had a huge deadline for my Fashion Visualization module, I had only a few weeks left to complete a research journal into the fashion of the 18th Century with designs, a layout pad with developed designs, a file full of visualization tasks we had to complete such as figure drawing, collage techniques and digital work, a final A3 fashion illustration featuring a shirt we designed from our research and a power point presentation of our work.

Phew! So as you can guess I was pretty busy! But it's all been worth it, I'm very happy with the work I did and I can see that my drawing skills have improved.. especially when it comes to figure drawing. We had to draw a model from life every Wednesday then develop refined figure templates from those, I'm really happy with how mine turned out and it's cool that they're totally mine and unique to me.

I did a lot of digital visualization too, something which I have had much experience with in past projects so I was confident with that work and did well with it. I learnt a new collage technique, using masking tape to create a silhouette, it was really effective as the texture of the masking tape mimics the texture of the fabric that would be used for a dress like this.

And this is my final fashion illustration that I made, it was inspired by the dresses of late 18th Century France, think Marie Antoinette but with a more contemporary look. I firstly hand drew the drawing, then scanned it into Photoshop and used a digital collage technique to 'color it in'. I hope you guys like it, I've already got my new project brief entitled 'Innovations' which I will be posting about very soon!

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