The Jewelry Fairy Tale

Do you remember your childhood? Do you remember those days when everything was brighter, more colorful and full of magic? Do you remember how fairy tales which we used to read when we were little boys and girls fueled our imagination and turned even simple objects into magic things? Girls must remember the times when their mothers’ dresses and jewelry seemed to be so beautiful in their children’s minds that they could have belonged to a queen from a fairy tale. Little girls live in a day-dream imagining themselves in a magic world of princesses and noble gentlemen. Applying their first make-up and trying on their new dresses and some simple jewelry, girls are ready to fly away to a fairy world in their wonderful imagination.

Everyone who had a happy childhood wants to experience again that carefree time printed deeply in his or her memory. Everything which reminds us about our childhood inevitably attracts our attention and fills our heart with a pleasant warmth.

There was a young girl from France named Anais Villemagne who contacted me with a request to create a few custom illustrations for her head jewelry design project. She was writing a thesis on this project and wanted to illustrate the concept. She could not draw, so she asked me to create a few drawings. Anais loved the style of jewelry advertisements made for Van Cleef & Arpels and those created by Guerlain. Therefore, based on her styles preferences, she did not want the future illustrations to be too detailed and burdened with too many colors. What she wanted the most was to focus viewers’ attention to jewelry accessories in characters’ hair.

In fact, Anais Villemagne had developed an interesting marketing strategy to promote head jewelry through evoking women’s childhood memories and giving them the desire to turn their dreams into reality and thus nudging them to purchase hair jewelry advertised by fairy tale princesses. I absolutely love her idea of a Jewelry Universe based on most popular fairy tales featuring female characters the majority of women secretly dreams to look like even when already adult and not that naïve as they used to be in the childhood. I believe that this could be a brilliant marketing idea not only for jewelry but also for apparel, fashion accessories, perfumery and other products designed to make any woman look and feel like a princess. If fashion or jewelry designers are reading this blog now, I can definitely recommend you, guys, Anais Villemagne as a person who can generate wonderful ideas to attract customers to your products (please, do not hesitate to ask me for her contacts if you are interested).

Another interesting fact about this project is that Anais was inspired by the Swan Lake ballet when she was developing her jewelry design project. Therefore she wanted female characters on illustrations to look like ballet dancers.

Illustrations for a Hair Jewelry Design Project

The first illustration features a little girl wearing a paper crown. While dreaming and imagining herself being a princess she opens a music box to see a dancing couple turning around like in a royal ball at a castle. It makes her vivid imagination run wild powered with so many fairy tales read by her mother. Her imagination takes her to a magic world of beautiful princesses and handsome princes and… sparkling jewelry.

Hair jewelry design project: Beauty and the Beast – the Reunion

Hair jewelry design project: Cinderella – the Flight

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Retro Fashion Inspiration

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.

Retro fashion inspires me a lot

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Vintage Fashion Inspired Drawings (Luggage Tags)

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

I created retro looking drawings of ladies

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Imitating the Style of Vintage Fashion Magazines Illustrations

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.

My imitation of vintage fashion illustrations

Vintage fashion models (1950s style)

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African Fashion Illustrations

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

Fashion logo created for UZURI Magazine

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Fashion Illustrations Drawing Stages

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!!!

Illustration Stages Pic. 1

Illustration Stages Pic. 2

Illustration Stages Pic. 3

Full Color Illustrations by Igor Lukyanov

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Hi! I am a fashion illustrator.

Hello! My name is Igor Lukyanov. I am an artist, illustrator and graphic designer from Ukraine. I decided to create a blog dedicated to my fashion illustrations after I had made a few fashion illustrations for clients of the graphic and web design company which I work for and my co-workers said they loved my illustrations. So, said to myself “why not to keep on developing skills in fashion illustration field and become a decent fashion artist?”. I dared to contact several fashion designers and fashion magazines editors via Facebook to ask whether they like my fashion illustrations. I was surprised to know that they found my illustrations really interesting. Some of them even offered cooperation in making fashion illustrations for their future labels and magazine editors wondered if I could contribute to their fashion and lifestyle magazines. Therefore I expressed my agreement when my friend who is good in English offered me help in creating a blog where I could show my fashion illustrations. If this blog is a success, I will probably create another one dedicated to my portraits.

I’ll be honest with you saying that I created this blog to attract potential clients who would like to have fashion illustrations of my style made for them. So if you are a fashion designer or fashion & lifestyle magazine editor and you like my fashion illustrations and want something for your magazine, advertising campaign or whatever, please feel free to contact me. My skills are not limited to fashion illustrations, I can create any custom illustrations.

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