Fashion drawing

In January, I got invited to the fashion show of Studio Jux at the Amsterdam Fashion Weeks. Studio Jux is a fair fashion brand that gives the makers of their clothes the credit they deserve, stating that their Nepali tailor is a rock star (which he undoubtedly is).

I really liked the show, and since I haven't done any fashion drawings in a long time, I decided to illustrate one of their looks. I ended up choosing an outfit with a huuuuge knitted cardigan that really made me smile with its pockets bouncing up and down playfully as the model wearing it strutted on the catwalk.

So, a drawing started on an afternoon in January and finished in the late-night hours in March. It's drawn 100% digitally, which is quite an unusual way for me to work: I admit it's very handy to have the Command+Z option when working, but somehow vector-based lines just don't feel the same as the ones drawn with my good ol' pencil.

Note: No, the model didn't really have blue hair, I just thought it looked cool.

Ready, steady...create!

To celebrate the launch of Dear Fashion Diary, we are organizing an open competition for all you creative souls out there! Want to join? Choose one of the Dear Fashion Diary's pages here in A4 or A3 format and complete it by drawing, painting, cutting and pasting, digitally or by hand. Then send an image of your artwork to hellodearfashiondiary@gmail.com.

The most striking submissions will be exhibited on our facebook page and at the book's launch event in Amsterdam! The artwork voted as public's favourite on facebook will also win a free copy of the book together with a custom-made illustration by me and my co-author-illustrator Laura.

You have time until the 10th of April - so ready, steady....go!

If you have any further questions, you can comment below or send an email to hellodearfashiondiary@gmail.com

Quick Draw Tuesday (and how I missed it)

There's this thing called Quick Draw Tuesday. It's a weekly drawing challenge open for everyone who dare to challenge themselves to create a quick five minute drawing of a randomly chosen topic using only their pen and memory. The outcomes are then featured altogether on the blog of Lucy Farfort's, an illustrator who started the whole thing.

When I ran into the challenge on Lucy's blog, I got really enthusiastic and decided to take part in it the next Tuesday. However, next Wednesday I realized I had forgotten the whole thing, so I wrote it down on my agenda to make sure I wouldn't miss it the next week. Too bad that when the next Tuesday came, I never got around to actually opening the agenda! Having missed the Tuesday quick draws already twice, I decided to take serious action and put an alert on my phone for the next time. It worked and I was ready to draw when my phone started buzzing today, but sadly it turned out that I had simply slept through the challenge due to time difference....oh well. Maybe I should start a new "wake up super early and draw" routine for Tuesdays...? :)

Anyhow, since the topic of the quick draw today was "stereo", I thought to post an old drawing that I made a few years ago when working for Drawing Room and making this set of playing cards. So, here it is: a stereo creature.

To take part in the Quick Draw Tuesdays, just put your alarm clock on next Tuesday and click yourself to Lucy's blog! Lucyfarfort.blogspot.com

I have something to tell you...

You know how difficult it is to tell about something big that you have kept quiet about for a long time? You don't quite know how to bring it up or where to start, which is why I'm going to start right here with an awkwardly metaphorical approach:

If my life was a pie, illustration would eat one quarter of it. Another quarter would go to writing and the third one to random free time activities, hundreds of movies, tea drinking with friends and occasional sports. The last quarter would go to magazines. Magazines and books. Thinking, talking and dreaming about them.

In the past year, I've been working on my own very first independent magazine Dear Fashion Journal, which I have mentioned here a few times. However, next to that there has been also another baby in the making! This time, I've been lucky to be in the project with a good friend and colleague of mine, Laura de Jong, and a Dutch publishing company BIS that makes great books...awesome books, to be honest (and not even one teeny bit biased)! One of my favourites in their collection is a book series called Ridiculous Design Rules, which never fails to make me chuckle and nod my head in agreement.

Anyway, the book we have been working on is called Dear Fashion Diary, and it's name stands pretty much for what it is: a fashion diary and an offline blog letting you document your fashion life, discover your taste and become your own style curator. It consists of over 50 illustrated assignments that allow the readers to grab their scissors, pencils and glue sticks and get creative.

We wanted to make the diary to create a fun tool for people to get to know to their wardrobes and learn how they express themselves through fashion. Me and my wardrobe have been in a bit of a fashion slump for quite some time now, so I really can't wait until April when the diary comes out and I get to start using it myself as well!

If you're curious for more about the book, feel welcome to follow us and our updates on Facebook or Twitter! :)

Let me be your sidekick

I'm not really into mushy, overly romantic things, rose bouquets or heart shaped boxes of chocolate, but I do like to take the advantage of Valentine's day to have another a bit more special day in a year. This time, I wanted to give something small to my boyfriend and decided to draw him a card. The idea was actually inspired by him; when he doesn't use different variations of my name or call me "dude", he usually calls me his sidekick.

I made two different versions and ended up choosing the more simple option (on the left). The illustration was also part of the Valentine's day Illustration Rally and got featured with a selection of other sweetly illustrated Valentine's greetings.

 

Since I started roaming about the heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, I would like to add that even if I think they are mushy, I don't have anything against them (or their contents). In fact, I don't think chocolate can ever be a bad idea, no matter what kind of package it came in. Actually, my boyfriend has also surprised me with chocolate once by leaving a collection of M&M's and Kinder Buenos behind my door. They were wrapped inside a plastic bag with an anonymous note saying "don't eat them all at once" (which I of course did). I'm sure they couldn't have tasted any better even if they came in a fancy box.

Leopard-skin pill-box hat

My dad is very much into music. When he started playing guitar an odd ten years ago, he was playing every day, all the time until he would get abrasion on his finger nails. When we are listening to the radio on the car, he always challenges us to recognize artists and their songs with a music quiz. It was my dad who took us to Madonna's concert, but nonetheless, he doesn't listen to Lady Gaga or Top 40. Instead, he listens to the "legends of rock", prefers blues over electronic music and is the number one fan of Bob Dylan's.

This week, my dad turned 50 and I wanted to give him something a bit more original as a present. He has been trying to talk me and my sister (who studies art) into producing some Bob Dylan-related artwork for quite some years already, so I took the hint and decided to illustrate something inspired by Bob Dylan's lyrics. I ended up choosing a song from "Blonde On Blonde", one of my dad's favourite albums, and picked the brilliantly sarcastic lyrics of a song called "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat". (Before grabbing my pencil, I read through some analysis on the meaning of the song. Apparently it's about Edie Sedgwick and her lifestyle after becoming the muse of Andy Warhol.)

So, here's what came out of it: an illustration featuring the first lines of the song. The style is pretty feminine, but I thought it would be okay - my mom doesn't really like Bob Dylan's music, but she's probably going to be okay with displaying a piece of it in the house if it's concealed within a cutesy package. A win-win situation!

   

So this is Christmas...

...and what have you done?

I never really got around to banging the drum for Dear Fashion Journal here, at least not after it got published a few weeks ago. Well, anyway, it's out now and available for ordering! It took me pretty much the whole year to get this baby out, but I'm very happy I did it. :) If you wish to have yourself a copy of this fashion magazine, which - thanks to all the great illustrators I got to work with - is quite an eye candy, just follow this link. As a little extra, I have made it my mission to attach a personal handwritten note to every copy that is ordered online!

Other than working, I have been eating chocolate in Holland, eating chocolate in Finland, wrapping and preparing Christmas presents. This year, I gave my sister a really pretty tote bag made by a brilliant illustrator and Dear Fashion Journal's copy editor Suzanna Knight, and one lucky (?!?) friend of mine got a jar of home-baked cookies. They might have become hard as stone, but nonetheless they were made with love and without any milk (she was recently diagnosed with lactose intolerance). Besides, even a hard cookie softens when dipped into tea!

And so this is Christmas, 

I hope you have fun, 

the near and the dear ones,
the old and the young!

Dear Fashion: Final Countdown

If I had an ukulele band, we would rock this day by playing Europe's legendary "Final Countdown" to you. Unfortunately, I don't have a band ...

Read the rest of the story here: Dear Fashion: Final Countdown

 

Serious and less serious problems

Yesterday, the saga of Handwriting & Fonting got a new exciting sequel called Capital Letters for Headers. I still need to fix a few errors before it will work properly with all the commas, periods and such, but other than that I'm quite pleased with it! Houston had a spaceship and the spaceship had some problems, I have a typeface and the typeface has some faults, but lucky me, those are more fixable and less life-threatening than the ones of Houston.

I hope?

Dear blog,

Thank goodness you aren't one of those electronic diaries the modern kids might have these days. Otherwise you would probably start nagging at me like a Tamagotchi back in the good old 90s for neglecting you. (Yes, I had one of those toys. Liked it, although mine seemed to have some serious overdependency issues - I couldn't even join my parents to go to the supermarket without taking that peeping bugger with me.)

In the last two months, the following things have happened:

1. My website decided to start collaborating with me and is now happily online, leading an errorless life. Hurray!

2. I graduated and am now officially a Bachelor of Fashion Technology. Wondering what that means? Yep, I am, too.

3. I've been living a double life, working part-time (as a secret agent, of course) and dedicating the rest of my days to putting the final touches on the soon to be born magazine, Dear Fashion Journal, about which I've been writing a bit also here, here and here. Dear Fashion also has a website and a blog now, and you're warmly welcome to get nosy and take a peek at www.dearfashionjournal.com. To all the fellow Social Media nerds I am happy to announce that the journal has also been blessed with facebook and twitter accounts, where we'll be chirping about our days and posting nice links we run into.

http://www.dearfashionjournal.com

Summasummarum, that's what we say in Finnish when we want to sum up and finish our ramblings. Now I will go and deal with my laundry and some other fabulous house chores before proceeding to the more creative and Dear Fashion related tasks of the day.

Talk to you sooner, not later!