Live runway sketching is a wholly absorbing activity that takes place in mere moments. There’s no time to think, only feel. The fashion comes in through my eyes and ears, down my arm and out my fingertips like an impulse, pure expression, a kind of performance. Although I never anticipated I would do live runway sketching in digital media, it feels like a natural progression and I found the results fascinating.

This post is a collection of the best sketches from New York Fashion Week, drawing major runway shows on Paper by FiftyThree, featured on WWD.com. The sketch above is from the first official show of the project, Yigal Azrouël, just one day after I tried using the program for the first time. This sketch had an added element involved because I was being shot by a photographer from Women’s Wear Daily while doing it. I had to hold the iPad at an unnatural height and angle, and sketch in landscape rather than my more comfortable portrait format. The fact that despite all of these adverse factors I managed to pull out a successful sketch was a total adrenaline rush. The competitive, game-like edge to this project was one I found exciting.

Paper held up to the significant demands of live runway sketching incredibly well. Considering I had only one day to orient myself to the iPad and the application, and I am by no means an early adopter technologically, the results I was able to achieve right away shows what a user-friendly program it is. Paper also keeps up – which is pretty amazing considering how fast I draw at a fashion show. I never had to wait for the program – which isn’t always true of wet paint. Of course, the greatest thrill is being able to easily upload images with total spontaneity – no scanning or editing required – which seems to jive well with what live sketching is truly all about.

The sketches above from Alexander Wang were the purest of the week. For some reason every ideal aspect of that show fell into place for us – we had a wonderful seat next to a tall platform where the models literally walked over our shoulders, and we had perfect 360 degree views of every single outfit. The palette was limited which allowed me to concentrate more on line – and the lines of the clothing were dramatic and architectural. Plus, the music, launching with an instrumental remix of “Eye of the Tiger” was a perfect soundtrack for rocking out.

My partner at that show, graphic designer Becky Brown, also was on a roll, capturing the environment and the accessories with her beautiful style of rendering. You can see lots of other beautiful images by other members of the FiftyThree team at the WWD on Paper tumblr.

The Diane von Furstenberg show was another challenging one because I was being photographed again, this time for Apple’s PR department. I had to stand up for part of the show and standing significantly reduces my ability to do multiple sketches. It was also a totally different mood for this show – strong and saturated, with feel-good disco music, so, seemed to demand a bolder line.

The temptation to use the undo function is truly the most profound difference that digital offers. The ability to take multiple swipes at a line to achieve ideal line quality meant that I did fewer sketches per show but with a much better success:failure ratio. The risk to avoid there is to remember not let the show run too far ahead of you while you’re fussing away at a minor detail.

The J. Crew presentation, sketched above and below, offered another totally different environment. With the audience milling up and down the runway and the models standing on raised platforms on the sides of the space, I had more time with each model I selected, and the models were also aware I was sketching them – which sometimes worked in my favour, and sometimes didn’t. The temptation to over-work and over-think a drawing is stronger in this type of environment and needs to be resisted. The trick is all about knowing when the drawing is finished, and moving on.

The final show, below, was the much-hyped Oscar de la Renta show, and John Galliano’s hands were very visible in every look. Corralled into a standing area for this show, I was struggling a bit, and didn’t move fast enough to grab a perfectly placed empty chair by a table just across the runway. Plus, it was an incredibly intimidating atmosphere, and at that stage of the week I was exhausted and scruffy and felt like a bedraggled little country mouse very far away from home. Still, I managed to capture two sketches which I think are evocative of the glamour and exaggerated femininity on display.

Nailing the final sketch of the project, below, I was proud and happy of what I accomplished. The entire week had felt like some kind of fashion-illustration themed race, and in the end, I felt that I had not only passed the finish line, I had also created a few lovely images. Heartfelt thanks to everyone at FiftyThree and Women’s Wear Daily. I was only one small part of a wonderful team that made this project happen.

This is the most exciting project of my career so far. I’m working with FiftyThree, covering major runway shows at New York Fashion Week using their iPad sketching app Paper. Even more incredible – the sketches are being shown on WWD.com! I’m attending terrific shows I would never usually have access to – designers like Yigal Azrouël, Alexander Wang and others.

For live sketching, you need responsive software that moves as fast as you do, with all your tools literally at your fingertips. Paper has got the goods. It’s so amazing – by the end of a fashion show I’ll have about half a dozen drawings, and I can upload them instantly, before the audience even leaves the venue – before the photographers make it back to the lab! Follow the WWD on Paper tumblr to catch the sketches mere moments after the show is over. Once New York Fashion Week is done, I’ll collect my favourite sketches and post them here on Final Fashion.

To have my work displayed on WWD.com is an honour. Women’s Wear Daily played a significant role in the history of fashion illustration in the 60s, 70s and 80s – employing a whole staff of illustrators full-time and giving them prominent attribution, making the artists stars. Several of my heroes – Kenneth Paul Block, Steven Stipelman and Antonio Lopez worked there. This project positions my work as an inheritor of theirs. I am hustling hard to live up to these legacies. Right now, all of my energy is focused on delivering my best work. Sketching runway for WWD is a dream come true.

Of course, WWD also effectively drew the golden age of fashion illustration to a definitive close when they fired their entire art department in 1992. Over twenty years later, to be able to bring the lost art of live runway illustration back to this venerable fashion news source, using a totally new technology, is a profound moment in the history of the art of fashion illustration that I am proud to play a role in.

Over the course of eight shifts at the airport using the Fresh Paint application at the Windows 8 booth, I created about 80 illustrations. Some took me just a few minutes, some took a few hours. I was very curious to see how I approached the project compared to the other artists on the project. The other artists all came from the same agency and have backgrounds creating corporate murals, street graffiti and classical portraiture. Those dudes (they’re all dudes) can spend all day on a single composition. Some of their work is very impressive as a result. I guess I have a much shorter attention span.

The truth is, I get competitive. As the program’s token agency-free girl-artist, I wanted to produce beautiful work that was very different than the others, and prove I could master the Fresh Paint program and bend it to my will. Above all, I wanted to make the most of all the drawing time, and produce something I could be proud of. Since I had free reign to draw whatever I wished, reviewing the work now is a journey through various tangents, subjects and techniques that reflect my interests and my exploration through the program’s possibilities. This selection represents the best 10%, by my estimation.

These first two are the result of looking for a glitch in the program to exploit, an intention I stated after the first week. I found a janky digital brush tool, which was so busted it couldn’t draw a smooth line, and I loaded it with 3 colours of paint. Then I would twist the brush as a I drew it across the screen which would make it skip and create involuntary jags. This way I could create a random, rhythmic pattern that would be wholly unique to the Fresh Paint program and the touchscreen technology. Artificial life!

This silhouette came from a request by one of the kids in the booth, who said she liked Victorian fashions. I’ve been using silhouettes quite a bit over the course of this project. Silhouettes bypass the necessity of assigning an ethnicity to every figure, as well as allowing me to avoid creating facial features in low resolution.

This one turned out so well, and of course I have a deep obsession with historical fashion silhouettes. This successful drawing inspired a whole series from which the next four come in order of creation.

I leaped back and forth between elegant historical female silhouettes and punk rock. At the time it was just a stream of consciousness to keep me interested in the process, but of course on reflection the juxtaposition is kind of fun.

The sketch below is inspired by Johnny Rotten, especially his unhinged, glaring eyeballs. I was a bit unhinged myself on this day, feeling rotten and high on cold medication, getting tired of trying to keep myself together. These little punk rock interludes are probably the most expressive Fresh Paintings of all, letting slip a sense of the creative exhaustion that is inevitable after 50+ hours of coming up with ideas and rendering them.

By the end of the series, I was finally getting a handle on how to make the Fresh Paint program actually appear painterly. I was working quickly and deliberately with a greater level of confidence, and I could almost make it seem as if I had used actual paint.

The last few images were, appropriately, very simple. As with any medium, achieving a successful loose composition with just a few elements is far more challenging than doing a very tight rendering. By this time, I could just let Fresh Paint be Fresh Paint.

Thanks so much to Microsoft, everyone at Black Chalk Marketing, Caroline Shaheed and all of the wonderful young event workers I shared this experience with.

Last week, I spent four days at Toronto Pearson International Airport, sketching on a touchscreen at the Microsoft Windows 8 booth. This gave me enough time to complete a significant body of work – between 6 to 12 illustrations per day, from which I’ve selected a handful of what I feel were the most successful images.

At first I felt a bit nervous about this project – would I be able to adapt my illustration style to the Fresh Paint program? It is a bit of a high-pressure situation to be performing your art in front of a captive audience. Once I started though, it became apparent that this challenge was going to be a lot of fun. Not only do I get to share the booth with a bunch of young, enthusiastic event workers, but at the same time I’m taking a bit of a crash course in digital drawing.

The idea behind Windows 8 is that it’s an operating system you can do a bit of everything on – work or play, as they say. As such, the Fresh Paint application is not a specialist, professional program with an overwhelming plethora of tools and options. It’s a straight-forward, simple toy with two basic options – either pastel or paint. It has a visual interface that is so easy – it was fascinating to watch both children and elderly folks in the airport figure out the program within mere moments.

That said, as a professional illustrator who is used to working with extremely versatile, complex software, adapting to the limitations of Fresh Paint required a shift in attitude. Although the programmers have done a great job creating a simulacrum of wet and dry media, knowing how to use paint doesn’t mean you know how to use Fresh Paint. Like every medium, it requires thought and strategy to use to its best advantage.

Using Fresh Paint is like a game. There are several available effects I can use – how can I combine these effects to create a composition? The canvas is low-resolution and landscape-oriented, which doesn’t adapt well to my usual style of figure illustration – so what is the creative solution to that?

There is this idea that digital art is by its very nature is slick and facile – I don’t believe that it has to be, although of course mine is by virtue of its subject. There is certainly a tendency to perfect and polish an image until it loses all sense of humanity. It is an interesting creative conundrum to attempt to allow an element of wrongness into a digital illustration. The oxymoron of deliberate spontaneity.

So over the course of this project, the concept of the “New Aesthetic” has been on my mind. When creating work using watercolour, part of the art is letting the unpredictability of the materials play a role in the work. Whereas when using a computer program, everything is predictable – brushes are always the same shape and angle, edges react with other edges using the same set of data every time. So the only way to introduce a sense of artificial life into a digital image is to find a glitch in the program, and exploit that glitch in a purposeful way.

At the end of the week, they’re just a bunch of simple, superficial images I’ve created. Yet, I’m quite excited by them. I’m going to be doing another four days, so next week there will be a second portfolio, and maybe some more thoughts, too.

This summer was an exciting one for The Cut – New York Magazine‘s fashion news blog got a major makeover, adding tons of new features and content, making it a stand-alone online destination for smart women who dig fashion. I especially love the exhaustive, biographical lookbooks of style icons, more long-form posts like these ones, and of course the comprehensive runway image database with the super-useful trend search functions… and back views!

This summer was also an exciting one for me because I received my favourite commission of my career so far – to create a series of five magnetic dolls for a media kit to promote The Cut‘s new look to major advertisers. It was a dream job in a lot of ways – creative director Owen Fegan gave me a tremendous level of trust, encouraging me to produce the most fashionable, fun dolls I could. We couldn’t reference any actual designer items, so I was also in the unusual position of designing “generic” designer clothing that reflected the best of 2012. It was a terrific creative challenge. Every day I worked on this, I felt amazed to be doing something I loved so much for such a great client.

The finished dolls were printed on magnetic sheets and laser cut with incredible accuracy. The results were the most beautiful physical renditions of my paper dolls I’ve ever touched.

The first doll represents Fashions. She is inspired by runway fashions, especially the more androgynous, avant-garde, minimalist ones. I tried to create a set of separates that could be mixed in a variety of ways to maximize the fun factor.

The second doll represents Fame. She has a super-glamourous, super-feminine, red carpet inspired wardrobe, with sparkly accessories.

The third doll represents Love & War. So, naturally, a boyfriend doll! I had a lot of fun making him as cute as possible giving him a variety of items ranging from boho to posh, depending on which of the three female dolls he’s dating at the time. I haven’t done many male dolls – I think I should do more.

The fourth doll represents Beauty. I pitched something a little different this time – a bust with a range of eye makeup and lipstick styles to mix and match. Since this doll is magnetic and doesn’t require tabs, it was a chance to try something new. I’m not a beauty illustrator – I’ve discovered that this is a whole specialization unto itself. Still, I love a challenge.

The fifth doll represents Goods. She’s the shopaholic of the bunch and she loves accessories and trendy stuff – whether it’s half-tucks, arm parties, cut-offs, or crop tops. Inspired by all of the it girls, personal style and street style blogs out there, she’s a hip, pretty young thing.

Thanks so much to The Cut, and Owen – who is amazing to work with – for giving me such a wonderful opportunity! I loved it!

This was a delightful brief – to create original covers for a series of novels starring a mischievous, feminine, intrepid super-thief named Pochette. Working with the author Lucas Edel, I decided to be inspired – though I hope not slavishly so – by fashion illustration great Rene Gruau, adopting his classic black/white/red palette to evoke a modern minx.

I am so pleased to be included in Martin Dawber’s definitive yearbook of contemporary fashion illustration. This hefty volume contains so much to admire and inspire. It is an honour to have five illustrations interspersed throughout including a full-page featuring my Jeremy Laing paper doll.

I am briefly quoted in the introduction from a longer email interview I did with the author – the best bits are below the fold. Keep in mind this was written a year ago!

(more…)

Better late than never – I’ve been meaning to kit out my Behance profile for ages. Of all the online portfolio networking sites out there, it is considered the one to be on. There is so much amazing work on there – well worth browsing for inspiration, and of course a terrific hub for hiring creatives.

I’ve put up a half a dozen of my favourite projects for now, and it was neat to revisit them. Are you on Behance? Say hey and I’ll follow you.

Last week I warned everyone on my social networks that I had entered yet another internet popularity contest. I try not to enter these too often because they are, uh… silly. But when I got an idea for reinventing the Anne Klein lion logo that I felt was half decent, I decided to go for it.

I’m not kidding myself – I know I won’t be able to keep up the e-whoring for six straight days (especially because I am in Paris at the moment), however the higher ranked I am on this thing the more visible I am to the real judges, so if you like my logo idea or you like me, please indulge me and give me your vote. You only have to vote once. It would be sweet to get in the top 50, but realistically, anything better than dead last would be wonderful. Thanks so much to all of you.

Also, please scroll all the way down and check out the full concept – there’s two elements to it that I’ve shown used in a variety of ways to suggest the versatility of it. I couldn’t tell if it was too obvious or too conceptual when I was rendering it – its obviously a bit of both which is what I think makes it neat. I should have used the logo mark as the leading image instead of the figure, in retrospect.

This summer I had a dream come true – I got to work on a project that brought my paper dolls to life, thanks to a dream client, Bloomingdale’s!

Pippa is a line of chic, career-girl-friendly separates, and the paper doll is a fun way to show how easy it is to mix and match.  Visit the site and click on Mix & Match to play.

Thanks so much to the team at Bloomingdale’s, I think the site looks amazing and I am so proud to be a part of it.