tis the season...

...to wrap up warm.

Other people dress up for winter, I dress for a space flight to an ice planet. This is the regular version; the snow day version adds a coat that looks like a duvet Slanket, an interstitial fleece layer and polar boots with ice grips.

Created with layers in Photoshop and animated in Clip Studio Paint Pro.

Fashion illustration: the Moretta

Got an idea for fashion illustrations revolving around the Moretta, or 'mute servant' mask: a Venetian ladies' mask held on by gripping a button between the teeth, rendering the wearer silent.

The Moretta was also said to embody the Renaissance ideal of feminine beauty. Stripping away speech and expression, the mask forced women to perform their responses, creating a blank canvas on which anything could be projected. Fashion is supposed to be the ultimate form of expression and identity. Which aspect is true?

Zebra Super Fine disposable brush pen and Pentel and Zig waterbrushes filled with ink in various dilutions, in Fabriano journal.

Esther Quek is my fucking hero.

Esther Quek.

Quote from here.

hair

An enterprising person decided to give the hairstyles at the Dolce + Gabbana Fashion Week a gorgeous colour treatment. I decided to challenge myself.

Tools: iPad, Daler-Rowney Jumbo Square Heavyweight cartridge pad,
Inktense and Art of Giving watercolour pencils, Cotman pan watercolours,
Da Vinci and ProArte brushes, Signo white gel pen.

And here is the final raw illustration:

fashion sketches

Drawing with coloured pencils and spot colouring with watercolour.

Note The Gap.

Chainmail skirt.

Daler-Rowney Art of Giving watercolour pencils, Cotman pan watercolours in A4 cartridge sketchbook.

Fashion Sketches: Superdry Girls

It is literally unbelievably hot here in London (I'm not joking; people are going round saying they actually don't understand how this can be the same place as last year), and that means mini dresses. I keep looking at the adorable dresses on the Superdry website, even though I know I'm not going to buy them. And then this happened:

I actually did have a pet rabbit who looked like that, I don't know why I am so mean. Poor Sei-chan, at least you're alive and well and happily adopted.

(The stains are because I was painting in the garden, and then I took my teabag to put it in the compost and splash. I tried to make some drips so it would look deliberate, but that only made it worse.)

I thought 'well the higher classes seem well represented, what about merchants and workers'? I like the fishers and their nautical stripes. The textile merchant...everything looks fine except that wimple. You can't even tell that's what it is, her head just seems like a separate entity. Maybe it's her la-la-land expression.

So this exercise was more satisfying than actually shopping for Superdry, but not as satisfying as I thought it would be. Oh well.

I like ... and I cannot lie

Has it really been two months since I posted last? The horror. I would blame work...well, actually I do blame work.

Finally finished another stamp collage illustration...

The top half is a geisha stamp I've had for ages, the bottom is Winsor & Newton Emerald ink. The chop is actually a genuine stone carved chop from Hong Kong with my last name on it. The waves are a mix of Higgins indigo and Prang turquoise, I really like the gradating effect they make against the torn-paper edge of the tea stain.

I am less pleased with the teapot stamp--it looks incongruous. That's an ill effect of doing everything on one page instead of Photoshopping in separate elements: no backsies!

Speaking of backsies, I have noticed a trend in my figures:

All my ladies lately have skinny arms and relatively big bottoms (well, big for fashion illustration). It's funny to note that as my body changes, my drawings do too.

I did call this one Tangerine Dreams, and then I changed it to Tangerine Dress. You're welcome. Prang watercolours, black tea, and Winsor & Newton Burnt Sienna ink, which has always been a mystery to me--why is this so-called 'burnt sienna' so dang orange??

view master - a progression of colour

Raw: Pen & Ink Sketch fountain pen, Pilot G-Tec C3, red Uniball Vision Elite and scraps cut out from a Vogue ad. Dress inspired by a Sarah Burton design for Alexander McQueen.
Coloured in Photoshop Elements - too flat!
Caran d'Ache coloured pencils - scanned much lighter than they looked on the paper. No whitewashing, please!
Adding the Photoshop colour layers gave a solid foundation and the pencils enriched the colour. Hooray! Now...where are her legs? oO

fashion sketch stuff

I've been on a fashion sketching streak lately!

Mechanical pencil, blue Pentel animation lead.

Mechanical pencil, Faber-Castell 2B lead--wonderful for shading.

Top cut out of a Free People catalogue, Pen and Ink Sketch fountain pen, extra fine, Pilot G-Tec C3 gel pen, and a bit of white Rotring ink for when I made a stupid mistake and crosshatched where I shouldn't have >_<

POLEMICA (Raw)

ugh you guys I have been drawing tiny flowers for two days straight and I am sick of it

...but look!

POLEMICA

I saw a girl on Guerrisms.com in a coat and a hoodie and she reminded me of my friend Abrar. My fashion obsession at that point kind of ran into my thoughts about how the Arab Spring reminded me of the EDSA Revolution in the Philippines. Add a twist of how I've been annoyed with random misogyny around the internet lately and voilá.

('No, commander, the word means "What is that in the table?" ')*

*sorry, Pratchett joke†
†oh look, another one!

being bored in cafes is slightly productive

Drawn with Pen and Ink Sketch Extra Fine fountain pen.

falconry

There are so many things wrong with this drawing (note to self: dear Pere, please learn to rule properly, or else get a fucking T-square), but I still quite like it. And I really enjoyed designing that bodice.

For A: Kikay at a Capiz Window

Long-lost marker sketch for the Kikay Project. Kikay is wearing Rick Owens boots, the rest is mine.

Peach Fall

Blue Heron waterbrushes, Golden watercolours (yes, the incredibly cheap ones!) and ink. Rotring liner and Pilot G-tec size 0.25, for the dots. If anyone wants to point and yell 'Aubrey Beardsley!' I must admit that it's more a Franz von Bayros influence than the great Beardsley.

And for God's sake don't Google that name when you're at work.

(Speaking of which, did you see today's Google Doodle? Happy Birthday, Señor Borges!)

Also experimenting with working in GIMP instead of Photoshop. Verdict so far: ANNOYING.

computer issues, Girls in Dresses

Computer trouble + bad install of scanner driver = crappy Photo Booth pictures. But I haven't posted for a while and I didn't want you to think I'd been lazy.

Some vintage- style illustrations I've been doing, using Pentel brush pen and something really amazing from a company called Blue Heron, which I will post about soon.

I really liked painting the butterfly dress.

One that looks like my friend Monique.

And below I've done one in the style of Daily Candy, or at least what Daily Candy used to look like, which I loved. Sadly they seem to have a different look now...

Anyway, I will figure this new OS out and hopefully get some decent scans in soon.

some things I have NOT been doing

Have been busy with.........other things *KOFF* so have not been working on the paintings over the past couple of weeks.

Here are my sample illustrations for application to the gossip column of a local magazine.

somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly