This is way overdue, but something exciting happened earlier this spring...my first illustration collab!
I’ve long admired my friend Colette, who’s been tenaciously pursuing her fashion design dream with her own label, La Fille Colette, which offer easy-to-wear, ethically-made dresses. So when she asked if I’d like to collab on illo’s for her new collection, I was very excited to say yes :D
Above are three of the five looks I illustrated, the rest can be found here.
Taking a brief look back, I think what I can take away from this project is that...it’s a lot more than just sketching some things!!! Of course there’s logistics like deciding on the medium and paper to use, scanning, editing on photoshop, etc. But there’s also the fact that when you’re doing a piece for someone else...that person very likely will have a vision of what the piece should look like. Seems obvious, but it was still a bit of a surprise for me.
In this case, the first iteration I did was a lot more realistic (with the face accidentally resembling model Irene Kim, methinks). But Colette had something more abstract, “flowy” in mind, a look that lends itself to watercolors. I actually love watercolor and was not sure why I didn’t start with that, but alas. A few experiments later, I had a new direction.
Now, getting poses right in a few watercolor strokes was really, really difficult, I found, so that’s going to be a focus of practice moving forward.