Holy Rendering Batman!

I'm still pretty slow at drawing figures and rendering fabric in marker and colored pencil is new to me.  I really wanted my Basics Project to look good so I spent most of the day Sunday working on the figures and the mood board.  Every single step took longer than I expected!  I had already done a lot in class, but there was so much to do for finishing work.

The assignment was to create a mini collection that would be compatible with stores like H&M, Gap, and Uniqlo for the 18-25 year old market.  We had to use a denim and a pattern and mix up cotton and knits.  I picked a green denim that was really cool and a striped green and off white knit, a blue knit and a floral cotton in green, blue, black and off white.  My colors were very coordinated which seemed a bit boring at first, but the stripe and floral combination was pretty fun.  And for that market, I don't think creative use of color is necessarily an important selling point.

I already had my ideas sketched and selected in class but there was so much work to draw four dressed figures showing how the looks would coordinate along with flats of all the garments (also had to be colored in) and swatches and a mood board completed the presentation.  At the end, I had to render the floral pattern on skirt with some fullness three times.  It took SO LONG!  Ugh.  And the crazy thing is, you don't have to show the entire pattern since they only see a small swatch of fabric.  I could have just repeated that smaller pattern more, but I just couldn't picture that as well as the way all the fabric would look.

Practicing the crazy skirt pattern

My desk covered in blue and green pencils, markers, fabric and drawings!

The mood board also took a long time.  We sort of did our project backwards this time - working from our designs before getting a mood board together proved to be quite difficult.  To search for pictures that show your customer and a similar color scheme after you've already created the whole look is difficult.  It would be easy to make color changes to a picture I like in Photoshop now that I understand it better, but I didn't have time to mess with that so I spent a lot of time finding blue and green looking pictures of background scenes online.

Finding a young looking smiling girl was pretty tough in my fashion magazines too.  The models don't smile!  Come on, you're getting paid to wear the most fabulous clothing, wouldn't it look better to have a coy sexy smile instead of a full on frown?!  I might just make my models smile on the runway because they ought to look happy to wear my clothes.