#i tried to replicate the lighting but it’s so hard with watercolours :(

[insoucianceart]

jonny :0

[jencostumier]

Est Professional Practise- Wk 6: Style and Detail

For this week's online task we were asked to style a willing family member or flatmate in different outfits and focus on recreating the pose, drape and detail. Rather than get my family to pose for me, I asked my mate Alice to send me photos of her posing in different outfits and stances, so I could recreate them for any length of time without the model getting impatient and wishing to change. Alice is quite a fashionable person and has a mostly monochrome wardrobe with a few blue pieces, blue being her favourite colour, but I feel I conveyed this in my paintings.

As we were asked to work in full colour, I switched between using my gouache and watercolour paints. I tried to recreate the different poses to the best of my ability, sketching out S lines first to have her standing correctly, without looking like she’s leaning. I painted her skin tone first, a mix of a warm tan colour and a few blush tones to try and replicate her complexion, as well as adding more definition to the page. 

For the first piece, Alice is stood in a kind of sassy pose, showing off her legs in flares. The flares have some draped movement below the knee, where the fabric flares out either side. I found it was hard to replicate this using the grey paint for the rest of the flares, so I used a fineliner to make the fabric movement more defined. This could’ve been more defined but I feel it created the movement anyway. I’m happy with how I recreated the Black waterproof puffer jacket, leaving some blank white spaces to convey the slight reflective, puffy surface of the coat. 

With the second piece, I’m not that skilled at replicating striped garments, so for the blue and white striped leg slit dress, I took a thin haired brush and lightly swiped on some stripes using a cool toned blue watercolour. Her side strap blue Ted Baker bag with embellished colour leather flowers on the front was easy to replicate, so I didn’t add much detail to it. 

For the third one, Alice stood in a slanted pose, body turned to the side but head looking towards the camera, so I tried to recreate the different perspective of the garment at a different angle, with the jumper and skirt being more turned towards the side. Her Woollen jumper is very thick and bobbly, so I tried to recreate this by using heavier brush strokes with the grey gouache, adding some ribbed knitting elements to the cuffs, collar and jumper hemline. 

With the fourth one, Alice is more dressed down in just her fluffy patterned nightgown, bare-faced and hair up in a bun with her cat Lilly in her arms. For the nightgown, I initially found it hard to create a clear definition of the white hearts against the grey fabric, but I found using a pencil and drawing in the outline of the hearts made it more defined and acted as a guide for where the grey watercolour would go. I then added a few light pink marks in some of the hearts to create a variation throughout the nightgown.

For the last one, Alice is just a wash of blue throughout, with the blue gingham dress and blue jacket draped around her lower back and arms. For the dress I tired to improve my attempts at creating both horizontal and vertical stripes, so I painted them faintly and worked more into areas around the hemline, waist, chest and shoulders to add some depth and detail. With the blue sports jacket, I purposely left some blank spaces to create the creases and folds of the jacket hanging around her arms.