I always admire fashion drawings. But often the figures aren’t suitable for the type of work I do..at least I don’t think so.

Pauline Weston Thomas’s site is a great resource for fashion – today’s and previous eras. I used her fashion drawing templates as a ‘kick off’ for my design here. It really just gave me confidence to go ahead as I changed the body and stance anyway. But the site makes you think about changes in modeling and body shapes. Poses acceptable today would not be appropriate for a model of a 17th century dress – the question is WHY? Today models seem to promote ‘desire’ in their stances.  Strangely, acceptable and common place models today have their legs starting at their waist! I’m sure many PHD’s have been written on the subject and I have my own social theories which I won’t bore you with here. However I’d be very happy to hear anyone else’s theories.

The first drawing is what I did in pencil and the second one has some Photoshop editing on it. In Photoshop you can isolate the scarf and change its colours and textures etc. Briefly the steps I used are:

1. Draw the model with pencil/coloured pencil/ kneaded eraser etc.
2. Scan (or take a photo) of the drawing, save as a jpg and open it into Photoshop.
3. Duplicate the original drawing layer so it stays intact.
4. Create new adjustment layers to modify the look. Layer>New Adjustment Layer.
5. Select the scarf using the lasso Tool making your way around its outline.
6. Use the Quick Mask button to correct any wayward selections.
7. When you think you have it right, save the selection – Select>Save Selection, type in a name.
8. I also then Inverse the selection to capture the background. Select>Inverse, then save this selection as well with another name.
9. Now you have access to the scarf and the background at any time by going to Select>Load Selection. From these selections you can change effects etc. Nifty!

Now I’m going to try it all in Illustrator.