Exercise: Everyday Fashion

Brief

Draw a range of people in different clothes. 

In some of the drawings try and describe their whole outfit; in others, focus on specific elements, such as different types of hat. You can take a reportage approach and draw people out on the street, or use yourself, friends or family as models.

Focus on describing the clothes through your drawing, but don’t forget the people themselves. Try and capture something of the wearer’s physical shape, posture and character as well as the clothes they’re wearing.

Work some of your drawings into illustrations which perhaps exaggerate what you’ve observed. You might want to bring in more colour, simplify your lines or create images that are much more stylised to do this.

My Sketches

With being at work and other commitments, I resorted to using a the internet to get references and to create these sketches I found a great few videos that showed someone walking around London. I filtered through several videos of theirs and also got carried away with doing them and also used Pinterest to create some sketches (The last two pages are entirely Pinterest).

I used a brush pen on top of a graphite pencil sketch and coloured pencil (for the last two) for the background.

My Illustrations

There was one page I wanted to experiment with for illustrations, and used one to create a newspaper effect-- just trying to be more artistic; the second was to create the Autumnal mood with the colour playing along with the Autumn clothing.

The last and most favourite illustration being a complete redesign with inspiration from the sketches I did, I used monochrome colours for each "model" and used a single line to connect the illustration together, it's unintentionally ended up looking like a character sheet for an animation show.

Evaluation

Breaking down the illustrations further, I really liked the outcome of each illustration, the first being really artistic and unusual; I was inspired by Mats Gustafson with the lack of fashion detail, just capturing shape, and then from that I used that same newspaper technique to make the second illustration more interesting.

The third illustration was done using watercolour, and I was so happy with the result. I especially like the middle red one as that has the highest contrast and detailing in the clothing. Together they make a really interesting fashion illustration, it could be used for a generic fashion picture (capturing different styles for everyone).

I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise, and I feel like it's given me more confidence in using watercolour and in drawing people; as I drew a became more loose and I started to think more of the shape than just the anatomy, I tried to capture different sizes and heights in the last illustration just to capture something unique from one another.

Thinking back, I probably should have really tried to capture people from life to really push myself, so I think I might try and do that for when I have to draw architecture for the next exercise.