Hey Guys! I am back with another video and this is a
continuation for my Style Exploration series, this time I am going to be using watercolours as
the main medium that I want to use for my fashion illustration. I have actually used this before,
but that was a long time ago and I've only recently picked up watercolours which
you guys might have seen in my previous videos, so for this video I kind of want to explore
how I can use watercolours for my fashion illustrations.
So, let's get started!
Once again, I began with doing a bit of research
on how other artists create fashion illustrations using watercolours. There were actually two
artists that I really loved the style and I felt like showed the kind of style that
I wanted to achieve for my own illustration. The frist one is Katie Rodgers. She actually
has a blog called PaperFashions and hands down, she was one of the artists who inspired
me to pursue fashion illustration. I remember finding out about her blog when I was only
14 years old and I absolutely fell in love with her style. What I loved about it is the
kind of raw sense that you get when looking at her illustrations. Like you could see the
guidelines and pencil marks she used before adding colours and it feels like everything
she puts down on paper was carefully thought out, like every line, every mark and I really
want to achieve that kind of style for this one.
I also really like Lena Ker as well which is an artist I recently found out about when
I found her on Instagram. Her works are amazing. It has a cleaner finish to her illustrations
compared to Katie Rodgers which I also love, and this is where the conflict starts for
me. I love clean illustrations, but I also love rough illustrations and honestly I am
yet to discover a way for me to combine both and achieve my own artistic style.
Anyway, keeping those artists in mind, I start putting my ideas of how I want to use watercolours
into practice.
First I start with sketching the design that
I want which like the previous video in this series is inspired by street style. I am cuurently loving
the combination of long coats and turtlenecks which I've been seeing everywhere on the internet
and it kind of makes me excited for winter, although it doesn't really get that cold here
where I live.
So after I have created the rough sketch,
I use a lightbox to transfer my rough sketch to my clean sketch and nowadays
I am actually using a 2H wooden pencil to draw my clean sketch because obviously 2H
means that the lead is hard which creates lighter marks on the paper compared to a 2B
which I always use for a rough sketch. The 2H pencil by the way is just a regular 2H
pencil that I got from Officeworks by the brand Staedtler in case I get asked questions
about it.
So what's different to this process is that
I actually initially decided not to use a black fineliner for this illustration which
is why you can see me immediately colour with my watercolours. But you will see later that
I will eventually add the black outlines to the drawing. For now, I coloured the illustration
in sections. you can kind of see the white gaps that I left which sort of create an
outline on it's own. I also tried to create a flat base layer and later I will add shading
to it as I go along.
And finally I am doing the black outline for
the face and the rest of the illustration. Like I said, I wasn't planning on adding these
outlines in the beginning, but then I felt as if the whole drawing lacked something that
made it pop. So for this one, I tried to put more thought on where I would place the lines,
but then I didn't want to take my time when drawing each line because like in my previous
video I want the lines to be gestural. I want them to be done quickly. That's where I start to
once again contradict myself. For some of the lines in this illustration, it turned
out the way I wanted it to be even though I would flick the pen, but for the other like
the line for her pants, I accidentally drew it rather weirdly. A part of me really wanted
to draw out each line slowly, the way I would do it for my normal illustrations, but then
I wouldn't achieve the style I was going for. So I kind of just had to let it go with that
mistake and convince myself that that line gives this drawing character
Other things that I did with the inking of this illustration is that in my previous video,
I did take a rough approach, but I made sure to outline everything. For this one though,
I didn't outline everything. I only placed a black outline where I thought it was necessary.
As for the line thickness, usually I'd place it where it would indicate the dark areas
to add dimension to a drawing, but for this one I tried to keep it random to see what
the result would look like. To be honest, I quite like it, but I still feel like I would
like it better if the thickness of the line really helped enhance the drawing rather than
being placed somewhere random.
And that's about it. This wasn't completely different in terms
of the style for this and the previous video where I used my Copic markers, however, the
fact that it's a different art medium creates a different look to it.
And so that is it I also hope you enjoyed this video.
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Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next one!