19th Century Fashion Inspiration

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

19th century dresses look amazing

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Drawing Realistic Fashion Illustrations

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.

Realistic fashion illustration

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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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