Preparing to move means a lot of purging, and this time, even more so. I’ve been tossing old binders of schoolwork, and I’ve thrown out a lot of my early clothing designs from fashion school, patterns, and so on. The trickiest to go through was old artwork – sketchbooks and illustration assignments. I’ve decided to err on the side of ruthlessness rather than sentimentality.

Still, its quite something to reflect on past work. Hindsight makes it a lot easier to understand what my illustration professors were trying to teach me, when it comes to loosening up and being less slavish to my influences. A lot of my student work is quite… crap, to be honest. Some of it is interesting. One thing that I miss about illustration classes was how they took me out of my comfort zone. I found these two from a series of chalk pastel stuff from ’03 or ’04 – not my favourite medium by any means, but something about them is quite nice and I hesitated to toss them, for a moment.

I hope any aspiring fashion illustrators out there can take comfort from the awkward feet and overworked (or underworked) facial features. The nice thing about these drawings is how I demonstrated at least some sense of brevity.

If I ever have any future biographers, they will hate me for being such a poor archivist. One of the things that I love about modern illustration is just how little space pixels takes up, and the freedom that affords. In order to make a move, I have to reduce the amount of things I have to just a few. I’ve chosen the things I will keep and store according to usefulness – mostly furniture & tools. My early development as a fashion illustrator will remain, mercifully, mostly undigitized.

Sometimes the loveliest projects sizzle into so much smoke. When I got this amazing jacket from Evan Biddell, I exchanged my services as an illustrator to create an ad for a certain independent publication. We came up with this, which I still think is graphic and slick and a lot of fun to put together, but for some reason it never made it to print. Now Evan is no longer a resident at the studio in question, so it doesn’t really matter. Still, I consider it a great, recent addition to my portfolio.

In addition to the drawings I posted on Sunday, I also did a lot of rough sketches of various visitors to OZ.  Here are a few, including Briony Smith (top left) and pr girl Christina (top right), who will be wearing this Biddell dress to the Power Ball, and Biddell himself at his desk.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with Evan Biddell in his versatile shared gallery space, OZ Studios. It was fun to sit and draw among comings and goings of friendly people, sketching is usually so solitary it was neat to feel like I had co-workers and collaborators.

Plus, Evan’s clothing is so inspiring to draw.  He loves comic book heroines and I love to draw fashion figures, and the project we are working on sort of meets halfway between.  Looking forward to showing it to you when its done, but until then here is some other stuff I illustrated yesterday.

Thanks so much Evan!  I hope we can do it again sometime this summer.

Any chance to be able to draw a model from life is so tempting… if there is anything I find inspiring it is beautiful girls wearing gorgeous clothing.  Lucky for me, yesterday I was invited by publicist Ashley MacIntyre to come and hang out at the LINE Knitwear Holiday lookbook shoot, shot by Miguel Jacob and styled by Juliana Schiavinatto.

It was a welcome chance to check out the LINE in person (silly me, I missed the much-praised debut runway show) – so chic and so soft.  The designers, John and Jennifer were there and kindly answered my questions, describing some of their favourite runway pieces from the Fall 2010 show.

The vibe was really sweet – Miguel was playing his favourite songs, and the model Marina Jamieson is beautiful and goofy, the pace was quick and light.  Thanks to everyone for letting me sit in and sketch a few loks.

I was invited to add a own contribution to the Textile Museum of Canada‘s new online space, Social Fabric.  This is a design for a mola inspired by my workspace. When you visit the site, you can view and zoom in close to many of the museum’s most fascinating artifacts, and submit your own comments and responses.

Fashion friend and kind client Coko Galore asked me to come up with a cute T-shirt design for her back up dancers to wear – and this is what I came up with.  Coko just launched her debut CD (buy it if you love candy and dancing!), and she’s planning on performing at the upcoming Pride festivities here in Toronto – I know I’ll be going, I’m super-excited to see these shirts in action.

Last week, Alexander McQueen died. Like many who love fashion, he was one of my favourite designers.  In fashion school, you would be hard-pressed to find a student who didn’t adore McQueen, idolize him, want to be him.  It was his subversive streak, the dramatic staging, the reverence for history, the attention to craft, over all a perfect blend of rigour and rebellion, that we all loved.

This is the fourth attempt at a tribute illustration to McQueen.  It is daunting to try and create a small offering of respect with my own modest talents.  I chose a favourite dress from his Fall 2003 collection – this was the first year that I was following the new collections closely, and of all of McQueen’s work, there is a sense of discovery that goes with this collection, for me.

Thank you Alexander McQueen, for inspiring so many of us to pursue fashion on our own terms. Rest in peace.

Today I had a neat opportunity – thanks to a new friend, photographer Jenna Marie Wakani.  She invited me to come and sketch while she worked on a photo shoot.  The lovely models, Courtney and Laura, are beautiful and a pleasure to draw.  Here are a few of my watercolour pencil drawings.

After my first attempt at mentally assembling the Sevin-Doering pattern last week, and seeing Kathleen’s take on it and the commenters, I wanted to try again, only this time I went as far as cutting a tiny pattern out of muslin and whipstitching it together.  I started by connecting the seams that Kathleen marked.

Except that once I got to figuring out the CF and the part that Kathleen thinks is twisted I got all confused. And how to deal with that curved seam at the back of the skirt?  So I flipped it front to back, turning it into a jacket rather than a dress. Then I fiddled around with the pieces at the bottom of the pattern, which seemed to want to become a cape, with an interlocking detail.

Kathleen says she doesn’t have a picture of the actual garment that this pattern makes.  I hope someone finds one – I am really curious about how close I am.