FO: Collection Illustration for Portfolio

Doing this little illustration for the title page of my Collection portfolio section has been on my to-do list for a long time - almost a year, actually! Last night, I was feeling restless about all of my other projects, so I grabbed my tracing paper and Copic markers and gave it a go. I didn't actually intend to finish it last night, but it was so fun to illustrate the shoe/skirt combinations that I looked up around 1 am and it was done. It's one of the last things I need to do to finish this section of my portfolio, which is one of just three projects left before I graduate.

Oh yeah, and all the shoes are Fluevogs. Yeahhhh!

<3

Cory

WIP: Fashion Illustration Porfolio Section

 

For some reason, this week I was really motivated to start messing around with my portfolio again. I've been working on it off and on for the last few months, so I had a few ideas about the next step, but Wednesday I finally sat down and worked on it... and ended up finishing a draft of the Fashion Illustration section. Whee!

In each section, I'm doing a different layout to exercise my graphic design chops. For this section, I wanted to give a varied but specific range of examples of my illustration skills, with a pretty script balanced out by an unfussy layout and graphic borders.

Over the last three years at NYFA, I've worked with watercolors, pen, colored pencil, markers, cut paper, charcoal, and Illustrator, and I've done a lot of experimentation with different media to get a variety of effects in my illustrations. I really enjoy having the ability and freedom to illustrate garments in all these different ways, and I think it's made me a better designer and patternmaker.

So after the fun, designy illustrations, I decided to include some of my flat sketches as well. I actually love doing these type of illustrations, especially when I haven't created the garment yet; it really forces me to think about all of the functionality of a piece, because ultimately someone should be able to figure out how to make that garment based on the flat sketch alone.

It can also be a nice reference for proportion and details - there were quite a few times during the show that I would look back at a flat sketch to double-check the design lines or seam placement of a garment!




These ones are probably familiar - it seems like just yesterday that I was illustrating my ballgowns! In the process of creating the presentation, I scanned the original illustrations and spent hours editing them, so I have nice clean digital copies that I can print or use digitally as many times as I need to. Thanks, past self, for thinking of everything!

Overall, this draft was probably about 8 hours of work, and I'm really happy with the overall feel of the section. The next section will be ballgown, so that will probably happen sometime in August.

Happy Friday!

WIP: Portfolio

I'm taking Portfolio class at school, so during class yesterday (and, let's be honest, until the wee hours of the night), I worked on my spreads for my Spring 2013 Collection.  I think I'm going to do a post about my graphic design inspiration later, but right off the bat, you can probably tell from these pages that I'm gravitating towards a very simple, clean look.  I like using neutral backgrounds and relying on photography to tell the story, and I've definitely already used some elements I've used on the blog as templates for spreads.

It's been really cool to learn more about graphic design, work more extensively with InDesign, and play with color, layout, and details.  Graphic design always used to seem like a scary, inaccessible medium to me, but I've started to learn that I'm actually very attracted to minimalist graphic design - which, when done right, still isn't easy, but it makes a lot more sense to my brain than amazing, elaborate spreads!  (This strikes me as funny, because in no way does my personal style usually read as minimalist; it's rare that I meet a loud, bright color combination I don't like.)  I'm inspired by more complex graphic design as well, but I don't find it to be as compelling as a clean page with beautiful photography and a few well-chosen words.

We'll see how well my portfolio lives up to those lofty standards - in the meantime, I'm having an awesome time booping around on my computer to find out what works!