I decided to create a series of portraits of legendary fashion designers who had founded world’s most famous fashion houses and labels which had being dictating fashion trends for decades.
A portrait of Guccio Gucci is the first in the series. Gucci was the founder of The House of Gucci which is one of today’s most famous fashion labels producing clothing, watches, jewelry, shoes and leather goods. It is almost impossible to find a photo of Guccio Gucci of a decent quality but I did my best to draw a portrait of this Italian fashion designer on the basis of photographs available online.
A few months ago I was approached by a representative of Prophetik Showroom (www.prophetik.com) who asked me to create some fashion sketches based on photographs of fashion designs and concepts. He said they needed the drawings as inspiration pieces for the new season. What I saw on their photographs reminded me 19th century fashion with all those chic corsets and magnificent dresses.
Here are the sketches which I drew using Pentel brushes.
Fashion photos provided by Prophetik reminded me 19th century fashion in Europe
I have always been inspired by vintage women’s fashion. Those retro clothes were so much woman-oriented that it seems that almost any piece of vintage clothing was specially designed to make woman look very feminine and elegant. Those were the times of never dying classic fashion which influence never ceases when it comes to female’s elegant look. Drawing vintage fashion is always a special treat for me.
As you already know I am very much inspired with vintage woman fashion. I really love that peculiar elegance of retro clothing (especially European and American fashion of 1950s) which made a woman look so feminine even when disguising the most attractive parts of the female body. This classic and elegant look of a woman of the middle XX century will always be appreciated by me.
I had recently had another opportunity to create some vintage-looking fashion drawings when I was commissioned to draw 10 illustrations for vintage fashion inspired luggage tags. These custom suitcase labels depict traveling women wearing vintage clothing. What I especially love about these fashion drawings is that they portray common women, not models who deliberately demonstrate their apparel. These women are captured in real-life situations while traveling with their huge suitcases and travel bags. Their heavy bags make those young ladies look even more delicate and fragile. But in spite of traveling haste and difficulties they manage to remain super elegant, cute and pretty.
By the way, a lot of people wonder what drawing tool I use to create nice looking neat and accurate outlines for my fashion illustrations. Well, I love using a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen to outline my fashion figurines.
The vintage fashion inspired luggage tags were created for Split P Studio, LLC. and will be available for purchase soon.
Retro Fashion Inspired Luggage Tags
I used a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen to outline initial pencil sketches
You might already know that I am a passionate fan of the vintage fashion style (my post about a custom pin-up drawing is a proof of my love for a good old retro fashion). I have recently visited one of the blogs dedicated to the vintage fashion and particularly to retro clothing magazines. I was greatly inspired by pictures and illustrations from old “Vogue” magazines. I especially liked the fashion illustrations from 1950s issues of the magazine. They are really amazing! These vintage illustrations and pictures do not only show the first fashion trends which evolved into today’s popular clothing elements and styles but also reflect a genuine talent and outstanding work of fashion illustrators who had managed to create true artworks without using any fashion drawing software, computers, cameras and other sophisticated devices. I had been so much inspired with those retro fashion illustrations that I could not help but imitate fashion drawings of those vintage Vogue magazines. The above fashion illustrations are drawn with a pen and pencils to preserve old traditions of creating fashion illustrations and to pay a tribute to retro fashion illustrators and their wonderful works.
It’s an interesting fact that when I had started my independent career of an illustrator and artist and began building my fashion illustrations portfolio the first my clients were American magazines dedicated to African fashion and lifestyle.
I created a few illustrations for BHF Magazine promoting African fashion and lifestyle. This magazine helped me to discover the beauty of African women. No doubt, living in Ukraine I see a lot of beautiful women literally everywhere (this is what our country is famous for), but nevertheless it was nice to discover the exotic beauty of African women. The owner of BHF Magazine had shown me a lot of amazing pictures of African models and I was impressed with their outstanding charm and prettiness. I could not help but dedicating this blog post to my African fashion illustrations created for African fashion magazines. There are not a lot of them so far, but I believe I will get other orders for African fashion illustrations from BHF Magazine or similar fashion and lifestyle magazines. Anyway, I enjoyed drawing African models and their clothes because I love how their specific beauty matches African authentic national fashion designs, ornaments and accessories. And I love how editors of African fashion magazines like BHF Magazine and UZURI Magazine point out African spirit and folk individuality through fashion.
Here are my African fashion illustrations:
African fashion illustration for BHF Magazine
Fashion illustration created exclusively for BHF Magazine
Another African fashion illustration for BHF Magazine
Most women want to feel how it is to be a famous fashion model or an actress and have thousands of admirers at least in their imagination. That is why I am sometimes asked to draw personalized glamorous gift illustrations. I am good in portraits drawing and that is why I can create some cool personalized gifts for women with a custom portrait. One of my recent commissions was a custom pin-up poster drawn from a photo.
Pin-up art is truly a symbol of glamor and female beauty admiration. Isn’t it cool to have your portrait drawn in a style which represents the roots of today’s fashion photography and classical female charm?
Here is the pin-up I have drawn with color pencils using a client’s photograph as a reference trying to imitate classical pin-up drawings adding a little of my drawing style. I hope it was a good gift.
Personalized pin-up gift poster from a photo
If you want to know more, please, read more about this commission on my personal blog in the post dedicated to my personalized pin-up drawing assignment.
Here is another fashion illustration I have created. This time this is a serious fashion illustration of a model wearing clothing with a number of small details such as collar, pocket, belt, buttons etc. I prefer realistic, cool-looking fashion illustrations, that is why I do not only thoroughly draw each folder and button on a dress which is, no doubt, the most important element of illustration, but also draw a realistic, although somewhat simplified model. My personal thinking is that model must look like a real woman and have real woman’s forms. Frankly speaking, I do not like those fashion illustrations and sketches depicting exaggerated skinny figures. I understand that those sketches are purposed to focus all attention on clothing design, but I think that seeing the same elaborated design on a model that looks like a female is supposed to look like gives more chances to a fashion designer to represent the design in more advantageous light which is likely to lead to marketing success. However, it’s just my personal opinion which is unlikely to be supported by a lot of people as it seems that abstract, non-realistic fashion illustrations are predominant today.
Here I showed again (as in my previous stage) the drawing stages to demonstrate how I draw fashion sketches and high quality illustrations. Unlike last time, I have drawn this illustration directly on my PC using a Wacom Intuos 4 graphic tablet. I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator software to create the drawing. Look how I gradually dress the model. Drawing a naked model helps to “put on” a dress on her which will naturally fits the model’s body and impart realistic look to an illustration. All you should do is to erase unnecessary lines after you have drawn the cloths. Unfortunately, not a lot of fashion designers can draw well despite they are very talented in creating amazing fashion designs. I personally would be happy to help fashion designers to embody their ideas and assist in creating attractive fashion illustrations in order to turn technical sketches of fashion designers into decent graphic art.
In this blog post I want to show you stages of my fashion model drawing. This will give you idea about how I create my fashion illustrations as I know that a lot of people wonder how to draw a fashion illustration, how to build a figure, poses, and eventually how to put clothing on a drawn model. Of course, my example here below is not very informative but I hope it will be useful for many people who are interested in fashion art and illustrations. As a rule, I make fashion illustrations in five stages which are shown on pictures below, beginning from figure building and pencil sketching to a fully colored illustration. This is, however, a little bit scrupulous approach to creating illustrations, a lot of professional illustrators would draw the below illustrations “a la prima”, i.e. without preliminary figure building. But this post is definitely created not for professional illustrators, but rather for those who start learning how to draw a model with clothes on. I personally like studying such drawing schemes and stages made by other artists and illustrators. I consider them to be rather useful for training illustrating skills.
I am not a fashion designer as many people seem to think about me. I am illustrator and some fashion designers as well as fashion and style magazines use me to represent their fashion designs or not yet implemented concepts and ideas by means of illustrations which is an unusual, attention-catching and unhackneyed way to show fashion to the world.
In this post I deliberately do not use illustrations of super-duper fashion models in luxury dresses as it is a New Year’s night and I want to make something down-to-earth and bring in a little fun. I think glamorous maids will be good models here to demonstrate process of illustrating fashion by Igor Lukyanov as I am myself a down-to-earth person whose heard is open to all good people regardless of whether they are simple “maids” or well known super models (I am using metaphor here ).
I wish you, guys, Happy New Year!!! I hope you enjoyed this post and it will be a little pleasant gift for you. And, of course, I hope some of the visitors of my blog will become my clients in this New Year. Cheers!!!
It is advisable to draw preliminary fashion sketches to determine which posture of a model demonstrates clothing best. When drawing fashion sketches many fashion illustrators do not care about body proportions and any other anatomy peculiarities. My personal thinking is that such fashion sketches make the image ugly and since I am a big fan of realistic portraiture and illustration I try to draw even preliminary fashion sketches close to how a real human being looks like.
Sketching models' postures
Sketching a walking model
Sketches for men fashion, women fashion and children fashion
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