Fashion Illustration Workshop @sketchbookmagazine's Pop up Shop

On April 17th I made my way down to Carnaby St on a lovely sunny saturday for Sketchbook Magazine's Pop Up Shop. After fighting my way through the crowds and tourists around Oxford Circus (and holding my bag like a baby after it was broken by the tube barriers shutting on it!! Not happy, it literally opened for less than 2 seconds) I got to the shop on Newburgh street for a 12pm Fashion Illustration Workshop with a lovely girl called Gabriella, who is currently on her MA and was teaching the workshop.

 Picture taken from Sketchbook Mag's online blog.



I had a little mooch round the shop before going down to the workshop - it's a great little space. I was going to take photos but after the great bag debacle I really couldn't be arsed to dig around in it, risking serious overspill, to find my tiny camera (one of the reasons why it ripped was possibly because it was full of heavy magazines and everything I lug around with me all day) so... there. Plenty of other bloggers have taken photos though, like Diamond Canopy's Winnie, so don't feel too hard done by.

I absolutely love Annie Driscoll's illustrations that are around the place - http://www.anniedriscollillustration.com/ so amazing. Really beautiful.

Images from Sketchbook Mag's blog, copyright to Annie Driscoll.

Oh, and free Vitamin Water though, that was nice :)

I love fashion illustration and it's one of those things that I always tried to do a bit of at uni, and love it (especially people like David Downton, so amazing) but was never any good. Drawing people has always been my weakness - I loved life drawing at uni but our course never offered enough of it, and the variety of model was very poor. I tend to draw people with strange proportions, which is fine, but not great for representing clothes.

The workshop was really nice, only about 8 of us I think, and we were all pretty much beginners when it came to it so it was good. Gabriella started right at the beginning, with proportions and how to get it all right.

I knew how it normally works, with splitting the body into sections, etc, but I had no idea that fashion illustration proportions were different to normal ones. It makes obvious sense because all fashion illustrations have really long legs, but I never gave it a thought before. You basically move the navel up higher than you normally would, and then split it up as you would from there. Aha.

The above one is an attempt at giving the model some kind of pose, with hips onto one side. Harder than it looks. A lot of my sketches came out looking like aliens.

After we had our poses though, we could then use our magazines to cut pieces out and collage over the top. I love collage, and do a lot of it, so I found this much much easier than the drawing part.

This was my best attempt I think. I loved finding pieces that were out of proportion to the others, I think it gives it a great effect. Her head looks funny though. You can see some of the other's collages at the Sketchbook Blog.

It's definitely given me lots of ideas with regards to how I could use this in my work in the future, and I really want to keep practising at it and get a lot better at the proportions. I also reeeaally need to go life drawing again, I miss it. It's just time though.. I don't get much time to do any illustration these days with my job now. Which upsets me. Sigh.

The workshop was great and really relaxed and fun. I definitely recommend it if they run it again: Sketchbook have announced they have extended the shop so I'm sure they'll be doing lots more workshops. If you have time, check it out.

Afterwards I crossed back over oxford st to H&M and got myself a new bag. Turquoise! Nice. Old bag was duly recycled.