Once again Kathleen at Fashion-Incubator provides an irresistible puzzle for a fashion illustrator who also fancies herself pretty keen on patternmaking.  As before, the challenge is to guess what the garment looks like based on the flat pattern alone.  This time, the designer is Geneviève Sevin-Doering.  Here are the flat patterns:

The red one on the left seems pretty straightforward in a slightly crooked way.  The blue one on the right baffles me.  This guess at the garment is really just a wild stab in the dark. My theory is that it is a two-in-one garment, either double-layered (as drawn here) or with two separate sets of armholes to allow the wearer to don the garment in two different ways.

I haven’t tried to peek at the answers yet – I’ll wait until Kathleen does the reveal next week.

Alison Lawler-Dean (of the adorable blog Gifted) asked me to contribute a work of art for a fundraiser called Heartbeats for Africa, in support of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. The loose themes are the colour red, and hearts, and I was inspired by the heart shaped red pincushions that are so common to create this piece called “threading”, featuring genuine pins, needles and thread.

The event is on February 13th, and there will be cocktails and lots of lovely art to be auctioned off for a terrific cause.  If you are in Toronto, you should go!  Buy tickets here.

After posting about the Trash Fusion contest yesterday, I got to pondering what I would do if I entered, and I did come up with an idea, albeit an idea which is somewhat simple and labour-intensive to execute – a swingy, tent silhouette paillette dress, where the paillettes are hand-cut from plastic containers.  It might be knitted together so it will swing around in a dynamic way when the model walks.

What would you do if the assignment was to create a dress from recycled materials?  If you have a great idea, and you happen to live in Ontario, you should submit your idea to Trash Fusion.

It was media day in Toronto for London-based designer Mark Fast, and I was lucky enough to attend and sketch some of his daring designs on live models, something I love to do.  Click the sketch for big.

I used watercolour pencils.  Thanks to Raymund Galsim for taking these photos.

I also got to meet the designer himself – and learned that he is inspired by process.  He produces each of his designs one at a time in his own studio, on a knitting machine, experimenting to discover new ways of producing surface designs – such as knitting in Swarovski pearls, or affixing leather pieces.  Adding and dropping stitches, which once stretched over a body produces patterns that are hidden on the hanger.

Mark has an affable sense of humour even after a long day of answering questions =)

That evening at the cocktail event, the gorgeous models Allison and Alex were still in sky-high shoes and skin-tight dresses, still looking great, total troopers.  Raymund took a picture of them with me and Anita.

While Fast insists that his dresses work on many body types, without a doubt the personality types that can squeeze this look off is very limited – that is women who love their bodies on display, whether they’re in the bloom of youth, work hard for their muscles, or are just innate superstars.  The rest of us are just lucky to look at them.

I posted a while ago about the CSPA unmasked art competition, and though at first I wasn’t sure if I had an idea for it, one came to me – an idea involving fingerpainting!  So I had to try it out.

I just wrote about my own struggles with skin problems this year, so what came to mind when I thought about unmasking was cosmetic masks.  I’m not sure if this is what the CSPA has in mind for a mask design.  Luckily they accept multiple entries so maybe if I get another brainwave I’ll give it another shot.

Usually I find nothing good ever comes of negativity on the internet – trust me this is a lesson learned from excruciatingly bad personal experiences.  A few  weeks ago, however, this hard-won assumption (among others) was proven wrong by this post which I noticed because in the comments, my work was being compared, unfairly in my favour, to the work of Gemma Correll.  It is embarrassing as an artist to take this kind of thing as a compliment – now I know what Beyonce felt like at the VMAs.  Besides that I feel empathy for any artist who gets criticized on the basis of style – style is personal, and personal attacks are very painful.

Yet it was thanks to this unfortunate post that I found Gemma’s flickr account and totally fell in love with her style – a candid, self-deprecating sense of humour with a lovely sense of personality behind the drawings.  I especially enjoy her daily diary series – its fascinating to see what other artists do all day.

Gemma invited me to participate in her “what I wore today – drawings” flickr pool, and even though I’m not much of a dress-up kind of girl, or a self-portrait kind of illustrator, the enthusiasm of all the participants has inspired me to give it a go.  Expect a few more of these from me, with some improvements as I figure out how to do it.

During my first-ever class I taught at YES/TFI’s Passion for Fashion program, I did something that is really very challenging – demonstrating drawing, live, with different mediums.  The watercolour pencil demo ended up being nothing special, but I was quite pleased with the marker demo.  There is a look that drawing quickly has that you can’t achieve any other way.

Its been far too long since my last extra-curricular illustration post, eh?  Today I tried the pattern puzzle at Fashion-Incubator.  Kathleen offered up this amazing no-waste pattern by Timo Rissanen and challenged us to show the design.

This is what I came up with:

Below the fold is the actual garment, in case you want to try it yourself.

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As promised, after some trial and error, I have made a watercolour painting of my blog friend Nadia of Nadia’s Crafting Adventures!  This is it as it is exactly – no photoshoppery this time – and yes her legs really are twice as big as her arms.  Its on a 7″x10″ Arches watercolour paper.  Stand by Nadia because this is getting mailed to you.

p.s. I can’t wait to see my black cardi!

Nadia of Nadia’s Crafting Adventures and I occasionally conspire to make trades – originally we made each other mixed CDs.  Later on we planned on making each other coats – Project Blogway – which was a bit too ambitious given our complicated lives and never ended up going anywhere.

Now we have decided to revive Project Blogway – she has some black yarn purchased especially for me and is making a cardigan with 3/4 length sleeves, and I am creating a watercolour portrait especially for her.  You can see her progress – sleeves!

For my part, I have developed the pencil drawing for her illustration, based on this favourite outfit of hers.  Apparently the illustration is almost perfect but the figure is not pear-shaped enough.  =)

I will post the final painting soon, even more pear-ish, and this time Project Blogway will be properly concluded with an exchange of cross-continental packages.