The Final Piece

For my final piece, I definitely wanted to use the combination of Gisela Balestrini’s body formation and the facial and hair features of Cassandra Rhodin. I then wanted to keep the illustration quite minimal and muted with colours, which is also taken from Cassandra’s inspiration on me. I really liked the second combination I created on Photoshop and wanted to recreate this as my final illustration.

As I was wary of overdoing the black outline, I decided to scan my illustration into Photoshop and darken the outline there, which I did using the levels tool.

 

This worked quite effectively, I then therefore printed out the Photo shopped, darker outlined illustration and use it as the final illustration. I found my previous attempt at watercolour using Photoshop, which wasn’t too bad, but I felt I would be more comfortable and skilled at doing the watercolour aspects of the illustration by hand.

I used watercolour paints and black pen to colour in and define my final illustration, I have my model wearing a basic top and flared jeans, as the 70’s is another trend for SS15. The colouring is very minimal, with a slight burst of colour to fit in with Gisela Balestrini’s style more.

I liked my final illustration after colouring it, however I didn’t feel it looked finished or professional enough, so I scanned it back into Photoshop, levelled out the background to a white colour, darkened down some features and cleaned it up a bit. I also added in Cassandra Rhodin’s illustrations of birds in the top corner for more interest, a blue watercolour background to reflect my coloured garment and my name.

This is the final illustration

To evaluate my final illustration, I need to be brutally honest. I am, never have and never will be an illustrator or even artistically gifted in the drawing department. I must admit I did not enjoy this assignment because of this fact, but it was interesting and fun to look at illustrators work and analyse it and then try to combine styles. I think my two illustrator’s styles do mesh well together and the final illustration isn’t completely terrible, I do actually quite like it in black and white, as it makes her look even more moody and sultry.

I realise that my illustration isn’t the most professional looking, but I like how quirky and cartoon like it is. The bigger head gives it an alien like tone and the endless, stick thin legs reinforce that this illustration isn’t realistic but shows the extreme and fun side of fashion. I did find my first year fashion illustration, which was done solely on Photoshop (seen above) and I like to think I have developed some skills since then, I also feel like now, thanks to Cassandra Rhodin and Gisela Balestrini’s influences and guidance, I have achieved my own fashion illustration style.

Gisela Balestrini’s Illustrations Breakdown

When it comes to Gisela Balestrini, its her elongated legs and figures and the slim line features of her models I would like to incorporate into my final illustration. Gisela draws garments that are portrayed very clearly in her illustrations, with realistic detailing and I would also like to use this aspect in my image.

http://www.giselabalestrini.blogspot.com

Gisela uses traditional media for her illustrations, with pencil drawn outlines and coloured using colouring pencils and promarkers. Her illustrations are very neat and precise, with all the textures and shading done by hand. I broke down a typical illustration to see how many heads it was made up of. This body figure is 11.5 heads long, which shows the exaggerated length of the legs, as they are 8 heads alone.

http://www.giselabalestrini@blogspot.com

Gisela makes the feet of her illustrations bigger than the head and again the focus is on the legs. The arms, hands and fingers are very thin and long and the majority of the illustrations show the model standing in some sort of sassy pose. The faces in her illustrations are old fashioned and not very eye catching, which is why I would like to incorporate a different face onto her body image. I am also not very good at drawing a lot of detail onto a small space, which Gisela has done in her facial illustrations.

I started by simply tracing the entire illustration to see how I could cope with the face and body proportions and details. I really couldn’t grasp the details of the facial features, which reinforces my decision to use a different illustrators ideas.

As I only want to use the aspects of the body of Gisela’s illustrations, with their extremely long and thin legs and arms, sketching the body shape using lines as a guide was the easiest way of achieving this.

I sketched the body shapes, using lines, in different poses first of all and then attempted to free hand the body, without a face or hair and added colour using promarkers. I tried to sketch the head separately in the shape and size that Gisela has done, which didn’t turn out right, so I had to rethink the head size of my final illustration.

Cassandra Rhodin Illustration Breakdown

I began to breakdown Cassandra Rhodin’s illustration style by tracing entire illustrations and adding colour to them using the same media she uses: watercolour pencils and paints. I did try outlining with black pen, but realised it wasn’t very effective for me and my illustrations, as I wasn’t very neat with my pen strokes.

I then decided to focus on the facial features of her illustrations: Cassandra Rhodin’s style is dramatic, dark and vintage looking. I love the way she draws the faces of her fashion illustrations and want to incorporate these features into my final illustration, as she does not show very much of the figure or clothing in her images. The bodies she draws are usually heads and shoulders, with flowing, draped clothing and not a lot of detail.

The faces of her illustrations are composed of extremely exaggerated, dark eyes, small noses and big, full lips. The eyebrows are very prominent, the face has a masculine, angled look and the hair has a retro feel to it, which can be seen in the sketches below.

I traced some of Cassandra’s statement faces and used bright watercolour paints to liven up their sombre tone.

Initially, before I attempted to draw the faces free hand, I sketched out the individual features of the face, such as the eyes, nose and lips on a large scale to see if I could capture the different aspects of each, which can be seen in the picture below:

Then, in order to draw the facial features in an actual face size and shape and based on Cassandra Rhodin’s style, I broke down each feature and sketched lines to try and bring the different components in in the correct positions, shown in the pictures below, I also looked at how other bloggers and illustrators had tried to break down her illustrations.

http://carlafinlay.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/breakdown-of-illustration-style.html

The above image was the final outcome of drawing the facial characteristics of a Cassandra Rhodin illustration, which was achieved by drawing the features separately, sketching out the positions on the face and looking at the original illustration.

R.I.P Oscar De La Renta

Another one of fashions greats has passed away. You brought so much beauty and glamour to the world. R.I.P.