It is always worth checking out the books and video section at the thrift store because you never know what you will find.  Earlier this week I was lucky to come across Fashion Illustration Today by Nicholas Drake, a book I had often checked out of the library as a student.  Of course the Today in the title is really 1994, when it was revised for a second edition.

There are all sorts of goodies in here, including early work by Kareem Iliya and Jason Brooks which is heartening to see as a developing illustrator.  While the DNA of their style and their burgeoning talent is very apparent in “Today”, over the next 15 years they both have developed a significantly higher level of  confidence and flair.  In the back, there are small bios of each artist, and for the living artists, there are even phone numbers and street addresses.  As if I could just give Joe Eula or Gladys Perint Palmer a call, or drop by.  “Today” seems so far away!

I took photos of a few selections of spreads including images that are really grabbing me at the moment.  Click the images for big.

Henri Matchavariani – particularly the image at the right.  What a fabulous flurry of speed and smudgy colour, lines so active they seem to race across the page.

Joe Eula – ultimate confidence and brevity – especially the image on the left.  Apparently Eula used to take his painters palette to fashion shows, sketch furiously, and wire the images to New York before the photographers could develop their shots.  This inspires me.  I have a post-it note on my computer, some scribbled fragment of an idea “illustrator in the photographer’s pit”.  I can imagine the rush of competitiveness.  This is something I would love to try, though I’ll never be Joe Eula and paintbrushes can never move as fast as pixels.

Thierry Perez – just fabulous, over-the top idealized sexy, beauty.  Delicious.

Michael Cooper – especially the image on the left.  The sense of spareness and speed matched by a certain intellectuality – using unexpected elements like actual shadows and deliberately un-fashiony proportions.

I met Adrienne Butikofer way back in 2003, when she was a fashion student at Fanshawe and I was in second year at Ryerson.  We were both interning very briefly at Pat McDonagh, and she hired me to do some sketches for her.  She still keeps those sketches around and occasionally threatens to put them on the internet.  By my current standards, they aren’t very good at all.  But at the time Adrienne was happy with them and I was just thrilled to be able to make a few bucks drawing.

Concept drawing of Butikofer Fall 2009 – click image for big.

Adrienne contacted me again in summer 2007 as she was preparing her entry into the TFI New Labels competition.  I helped her with the illustrative part of the entry, and once she was a finalist in the competition she hired me as a studio assistant on an as-needed basis to help meet the deadlines.  Since then I’ve had the chance to work with her off and on for various projects.  Its a lot of fun to work with Adrienne in the studio, often doing cutting and patternmaking, and working on samples.  For me, its a counterpoint to the more solitary, less physical work I do in my own studio.  Our collaboration reached its apex (and the end, at least for the time being) when we went to Las Vegas with her Fall 2009 line.  She’s about to have a baby and take a well-deserved haitus.

Even on maternity leave, she still has a lot going on.  She’s currently delivering her snappy Spring 2009 line, and she’s having a sample sale on her website with a ton of terrific deals on favourites like her reworked menswear and skinny sweats.  I am very excited to be reading her brand new blog – I love her writing.  She has a great sense of humour and a compelling candour about her life and her business.

I’ve learned a lot of things from Adrienne about being a fashion designer, and also I think I better understand my other fashion designer clients because of her.  They are a hard-working, ambitious breed of individual who ride the seasons like waves.  From a world of possibilities at the beginning of the season to the rock solid delivery deadlines at the end, its a cyclical path that requires incredible determination, resources and support.

Above everything, designers are driven to do what they do.  Just as it seems that the demands of the current season are overwhelming, Adrienne is always finding fabrics and inspiration and enthusiastically making plans for the next one.  Amazing.  Having had the great luck to work with her in person many times, I am filled with admiration her as a designer and a human being, and feel great affection for her both as a client and as a friend.

I asked her a few questions about her career and her plans.

Why did you become a fashion designer?

I think I originally went to fashion school because I love to sew, and I expressed myself creatively through clothing and how I dressed. It wasn’t until I was at the University of Western Ontario studying science that I realized it however. I think starting my own label kind of just happened. I have always been driven to make clothing, pretty much since high school. I started selling one offs and small runs through little boutiques here and there in Toronto after graduating college. Eventually, I used the New Labels competition as a way to finally catch up with the fashion calendar, and turn my passion into a career. (Hopefully)

What do you love about fashion?

I am really inspired by technique and I love that fashion is a learned trade- skill level and design ability often go hand in hand. I love being blown away by something, when it takes longer than 5 seconds to figure out how someone achieved something with fabric. I find it really intriguing that it’s a necessity of life, and how that may or may not affect someone’s fashion choice. I myself am drawn to functionality, and when pieces have more than one personality. I get really excited by something making sense, with a complex idea but a simple execution, or the other way around. On the other hand- sometimes it’s just about making something cool, or interesting, or comfortable, or necessary. Like skinny sweats- all of the above.

When was the proudest moment of your career?

I don’t think there is one singular moment, but collectively the past couple of years have been great. I’ve worked really hard, pushed forward, and learned a ton. My trip to Las Vegas didn’t turn out that well, and I’ve been on a bit of a downer since- but I am still proud that I did it. The whole experience made me learn how to package myself and my brand professionally, and I really love my collection. There is a lesson in everything, and all these little experiences are making me a better, smarter designer. Unless I fall and hit my head and get amnesia, it’s almost a guarantee that I will never regress into a worse, stupider designer. Everything happens when it’s supposed to.

What are your plans for the future?

Well, I’m eight months pregnant right now. . . so who knows? I can’t possibly pretend to know what my life is going to be like in a month. I’ve pretty much made the decision to skip Spring 2010. I want to spend the summer doing all the things that I’ve put off over the years because I’ve been working 7 days a week- day trips to the country to look for farmers markets; going to the beach on a whim. I’d love to try my hand at canning, I’d love to succeed at gardening. I want to make frivolous things for the baby- like rhinestone encrusted silk dresses. I am hoping for a simple, non stressful life filled with pioneer-like activities that I can do with a baby on the hip. And I shall blog all about it.

But, back to reality, I’ve got my eye on Fall 2010-11. So, I am also going to spend the summer studying technique, researching inspiration and sourcing for it. It’s beginning to brew already.

What happened to my stats here?  Its StumbleUpon.  Someone put my “admiration and inspiration” posts into the playlist and now all these Stumblers!  Thanks for coming everyone.  If you love fashion illustration as much as I do, please feel free to poke around and check out my own junior contributions to the tradition.

Thanks to this happy accident, I’ve stumbled onto StumbleUpon, and found it to be a most delightful, random way to spend time on the internet.

My little tribute posts to the great fashion illustrators who influence and inspire me never seem to get a great response, and yet I keep posting them. The very least I can do as a burgeoning illustrator is to recognize and celebrate the greats who came before me, and leave a mark on the internet for all those who might seek to learn a little more about these imagemakers who might otherwise remain obscure.

As an aspiring Canadian fashion illustrator, I have found that the legacy of the profession in this country is particularly spare, but having kept my eyes open for clues over the past five years, I have discovered some wonderful fashion illustrators with remarkable careers and diverse styles.

Virginia Johnson is a textile designer and illustrator who has her own storefront here in Toronto. Her illustrations are best known for adorning Kate Spade’s series of books. Johnson has a delicate, spare line and a brush full of vibrant watercolours which complement Spade’s style marvelously.

Maurice Vellekoop‘s illustrations and comics feature a gently wry social scenery. His style is clean and classic and familiar. Famously commissioned by Vogue to sketch at the Paris shows (I believe it was in the late 90s), Vellekoop is Canada’s most well-known fashion illustrator. Vellekoop has done the gamut of lifestyle illustration from the conventionally mundane to the extravagantly gay.

I discovered Frederick Watson via the gorgeous Joelle of Mad Glam, I recognized his work and had no idea that he was based here in Ontario. Although he paints on a grand scale, I especially loved the small-scale sketches which display that incredible speed and elegance that I am only beginning to understand, never mind acquire.

Marcos Chin is a younger illustrator whose work you will recognize if you have ever taken a subway ride in Toronto – his Lavalife campaign is well worth the rapt attention of a captive audience. Like Vellekoop, Chin is mainly a lifestyle illustrator, yet the clothing details and exaggerated figures definitely captures a sense of fashion.

Throughout my search for Canadian fashion illustration, I have discovered that there is very little written specifically about the subject. The only essay I have read is written by Katherine Bosnitch, one of my illustration teachers from fashion school and an accomplished fashion illustrator in her own right. Bosnitch studied a series of wonderful promotional illustrations for Eaton’s published in the Montreal Gazette in the 1950s and 1960s. The essay is included among several other rare examples of Canadian fashion analysis in Fashion: A Canadian Perspective.

Are there any Canadian Fashion Illustrators I am missing? I would love to learn about them, meet them, and see their work.

Last time I posted about some of my favourite fashion illustrators, some of you commented that you did not know of them and you enjoyed learning more about them. That is all the encouragement I needed to post another set of great fashion illustrators – there are so many worth mentioning.

At the library I picked up 100 Years of Fashion Illustration100 Years of Fashion Illustration which is an excellent survey of modern fashion drawings. It disproves my erroneous notion that there were not many illustrators in the sixties and seventies too. This book is recommended without hesitation, even if the captions sometimes leave something to be desired, the selection of drawings is broad and well edited.

Thayaht brought cubistic influence to fashion illustration, most famously rendering Madeleine Vionnet’s incredible work. His work is tight and precise, and yet never static. The careful compositions create movement and interest with accurate use of colour, line and pattern. Thayaht is the ultimate modern fashion illustrator, though his work was created almost a century ago.

Julie Verhoeven‘s sensual raunchiness is a great deal more postmodern. Using pen and ink and a photocopy machine her images retain the smudges of her hand and express a very specific character. They also tend to be more abstract than descriptive when it comes to that actual element of fashion as clothing. Verhoeven’s illustrations tend to be on clothing and accessories rather than of clothing and accessories. Yet she is also a designer for Mulberry and others, so she must know how to dress figures as well – it seems that with her drawings, she prefers not to take fashion illustration too literally.

Gladys Perint Palmer is the master of the quick and clever runway illustration.  Her book, Fashion People, is a must read for… er, fashion people.  It is like getting notes passed to you from the front row.  While I make every effort to be ably to sketch on my knee as fast as GPP, her style of wit is beyond my own abilities.  Certainly GPP  shows that the best fashion illustration requires the skill to execute and express, but even more importantly it requires character and a point of view.

I will be taking my sketchbook to L’Oreal Fashion Week in Toronto soon and attempting to pass you my own notes from the (third or fourth) row.  I am no GPP, but runway illustration is every bit as fun as she makes it look.

The 20th century’s greatest fashion illustrator is without a doubt Rene Gruau.  His distinctive outline, elegant figures and inventive compositions influence and inspire all of us.

There are so many fashion illustrators out there, a few whose work influences my own practice. Surprisingly, I have never posted about this, so I thought I would fix that omission by showing some work by illustrators I admire and reveal some of the names behind the drawings, since many fashion illustrators are not credited and virtually impossible to learn about online. Click on the pictures if you want to see a bigger view.

While I was at fashion week in New York, the display at the M.A.C. Cosmetics booth featured incredibly lively, gorgeous watercolours which the staff there called face charts. Far from the characterless face drawings that makeup artists plot their ideas on, these things were stunning to look at in addition to conveying the what colours and combinations go on models’ faces. These paintings were done by an artist named Amelie Hegardt. She was not credited – I had to get the staff to make a call to find out who she was. This is the type of thing that I admire but struggle to aspire to – watercolours and painting in general has never come naturally to me, and that light touch that Hegardt shows here is the essence of what makes watercolours such a challenge – space and restraint form the image as much as the brush and pigment does.

Back in his day, Antonio Lopez was far from obscure – in fact he was on a first name basis with the fashion industry. But now his work is not often referenced, despite the fact that for a few decades he was basically the only working fashion illustrator there was. Once colour photography and glossy full-colour printing came literally into Vogue in the 1960s and 70s, illustration was deemed yesterday’s news and photography dominated the fashionable press. They say there is always room for great talent and Antonio stayed in business because he was the best. In a field where styles get dated quickly, Antonio adapted and updated his work through three decades and stayed in print. His drawings, done from life, are incredibly facile and lively with an attention to anatomy that is rare in fashion illustration. There is no decent website for Antonio fans out there – Antonios People, and I was able to find this image scanned from the book via The Fashion Spot. One image hardly suffices to show all that is Antonio – I highly recommend tracking down the book if you are interested in fashion’s most prolific illustrator.

David Downton is in my opinion the world’s greatest living fashion illustrator. I can only dream of achieving his great skill at making gorgeous images, and dream I do! As you can see from this pencil sketch he achieves a lot with partiality and space as well as stunning line work, and his images on occasion evoke modern fashion illustration’s greatest, Rene Gruau. One thing that gives me heart in this sketch is the hand where you can see an erasure… it is a relief to see a second thought within a virtuouso performance. Downton works from life, and has sketched many of fashion’s most beautiful faces, most notably his friend and collaborator Erin O’Connor. His great attention to character and accurate anatomy is what I admire most about his work.

My friend Mary Helen is working in New York City, and one day she posted this little drawing as her Facebook profile picture. Not only was it recognizable as a brief portrait of her, but I instantly recognized the style – it belongs to a designer named Renaldo Barnette. Mary Helen was surprised that I knew who did the drawing… because Renaldo Barnette is not famous! In fact, this post will make finalfashion.ca the first site on the internet that shows his work. Barnette, who designs at the upscale ladieswear label where Mary Helen assists, gave me permission to post this, so I am glad I can offer a little internet notoriety to someone who deserves to be known.

I discovered Barnette in Linda Tain’s book Portfolio Presentation for Fashion Designers, where examples from his portfolio leaped out of the full colour insert. Barnette considers himself a designer first, who happens to be a quick draw. Though I see myself as an illustrator first and a reluctant designer, his work compels me because it is not only beautiful and quick, it functions as a fashion illustration should – showing a sense of style, and also describes clothing and ideas with technical detail. While Barnette is the illustrator’s designer, and I find my own position as a designer’s illustrator, the essence of what we do is the same – communicating clothing designs with drawings that also stand on their own merit as fashion illustration.

These last two images are a few designs that Barnette offered to allow me to show you, as an example of what he does best. His strength as a designer is ideas and details that are wearable and also clever; and as a renderer he shows his abilities with the art marker. This image seems to be only lightly colour corrected – all four figures were drawn directly on one page, using a media that allows no second chances. These pages seems effortless, as if the designer was just carelessly jotting down his ideas.

What fashion illustrators do you admire?