Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey. I'm Katie Rogers and I started the blog Paper Fashion. I thought it was a great way to get my work out there
and to share it. I didn't necessarily think it would grow to
what it is today. In this class, we're
going to be taking runway looks and creating illustrations of that
from start to finish, showing you each staff
on how I get inspired and how I illustrate that with watercolor and how I finish them and add extra details to give
them a little more interest. Once we've gone
through this class and you've seen the process
and done it yourself, I think you'll have a much
better understanding of how actual designers work and how they take not
just a runway look, but they also just take an
idea and sketch it this way, and visualize what's
in their head.
2. Sketching: In the first step of the class, we're going to go through finding inspiration and ticking the runway looks, and then creating a sketch from them whenever it's fashion which it was just couple weeks ago. As these shows are happening, you can either live stream and watch them if you can't be at the show or you can look at them later online. I go through each show one at a time and I pick out my favorite looks. I think it's really up to you like what speaks to you the most, what stands out the most. It's just like when you are looking at all of these ocean of fashion there's always going to be these certain things that just pop out to you where you're like, "Oh, this it's super romantic, it's pretty, it would make a beautiful illustration." That's how my process works. I just really go towards what I initially join to. I don't spend too much time looking at each piece. It's just go through it, pick out what stands out the most, and usually your instincts are correct. For instance, this one, it's striking to me, as I would see it in an illustration. Because it's so simple, it's so elegant and feminine, but it has a lot of detail to it with the texture. That's something I like to play with in illustrations is texture, same with this one. It's really simple, but it has texture up top and it has a really nice flowing bottom. You can play with the folds in the fabric and the shin of the fabric. This one, it just makes this really beautiful lookwards flowing back and forth. That's something you can easily capture with watercolor. This DR look is really striking to me. It's got a really strong silhouette to it. When you're illustrating things like this, you want to over-exaggerate it. This volume in the bottom here, this is something that I would blow out on an illustration because that's what this look is about. It's about the volume on the bottom here and the pattern play. Then on the top it's super simple, it's shear, which is something you can also play with on an illustration. But yeah, it's pieces like that that really stand out to me. I always stick with this one paper. I think there are other papers that are nice out there and there are cheaper versions which are fine for starting out another shooting. But I prefer this, which is the aquarelle arches. It's a really nice watercolor block paper. I take these images and I make them digital afterwards. It's really important for me to have a smooth finish on it for when I'm scanning, so I get the grain satine. If you have the rougher watercolor paper, it's really hard to scan it. I can scan it and there's going to be bumps everywhere and the coloring is going to be inconsistent. That's something that personally works for me. When I first started sketching, I do use mechanical pencils a lot, which isn't taught in school to use mechanical pencils when you are illustrating just because of the line way, but I just love the quick not having to sharpen your pencil and just get the sketch out. It's great for that. But if I'm doing something that you're going to see the sketch a lot more or it's going to show through or it's more to stick, I would use a real artist pencil. I tend to use softer leads because it's really easy to make a nice line with this. I usually go with a 2B, or a 3B. After you sketch sometimes, we'll go through this later, but you maybe press down too hard or your sketch is too dark, so I do like to go in and lighten it up a bit. This is just a rubber kneaded eraser, and it really picks up graphite really well. Same for this, this one you can use for details erasing or you could just like the same as this, you can wipe it over your drawing just to pick up some excess pencil. I'm going to start by illustrating this DR look. You don't necessarily need to start by doing the same pose that's already on here. I'm going to do a side view just to show the volume a little bit more. When you start sketching, you want to start towards the top with the head. Make sure you're holding a pencil really loosely and not getting too tight with it. I'm just going to start really lightly. Just do a head, and you just want to get a really basic shape down without thinking too much about it and really overemphasize the fact that her skirt is giant. I usually add circles where her joints are. Like her shoulder and then her elbow, and emphasize her waist. When you're doing the bottom of a skirt or something with a flowy fabric look, you want to do a basic shape and then go back after and give it a little more movement. But keep it really loose again, and don't think too much about doing a perfect line and a perfect drawing right away. Then I'm going to go back and put some folds in the fabric. I'm going to add a little more detail to her face. Then as you're adding hair and things like that, don't think too much, be really simple with that just because this sketch is about the dress, and you really want to just focus on that mostly. For the hair, I'm just going to do simple band type thing. Then it's a good thing to remember is when you use a harder line way, you want to do it where her way is going. For instance, she's like leaning backwards a bit as she's going forward. Adding the darker lines on her back let you see that visually. Even here, the way on the skirt is towards the bottom. You add a little bit of darker lines there. It gives that illusion of the way being on the skirt. For the feet, you don't really need to show too much. It's nice when there's not too much detail in there, just tend towards a foot. For the pattern, same thing, you don't want to be too detailed with it. You just want to be really lose just to hint towards there being a flow pattern on there. Now that we have a pretty basic sketch down and it's loosely done, you want to make sure you have it looking how you want. If you don't, you can always start over. When you're looking to do a pose, really think about the garment that you're illustrating and what's most important about it and what you want to show on that. Like I said before, I did this on a side view because this skirt is the most important thing. You really want to show that on a side view illustrates the fact that it's so wide, so huge, and that the top of her is really fitted and small. Now we have the sketch and it's pretty much finished, but now I'm going to get it ready for the next step. I'm going to take my kneaded eraser just because some of my lines are a little bit darker than I want. A good way to lighten it up a little bit for the watercolor is just roll your eraser over your drawing where it's a little bit dark or just like dab it a bit and it picks up some of the graphite. If you don't have a kneaded eraser, you can always use a more standard eraser like this, and just lightly rub it over the surface. I will do the same thing and pick up that graphite. Then your sketch is pretty much ready now to add color to.
3. Applying Watercolors: The watercolors that I use, I've used a few different types and these are by far the best that I've used. They are called Mission Mijello Gold. But they come in two form and then I take them. I just bought one of these simple metal watercolor palettes from that store. You can get them everywhere. This one is nice because if I am painting something large, it has a palette holder so you can just hold your palette like Bob Ross style. You add your color to the palette and it stays forever. Watercolor's nice because there's really no maintenance. You have your color, you don't have to keep it wet or dry or anything. It's always there and it's always ready to go. Another great option for watercolor are the Winsor & Newton. Both the Winsor & Newton and the Winsor & Newton cotton and colors are really great. As far as brushes go, I keep it really simple. Nine times out of 10 I use an angled brush. Both for these are angled cheaters. I really like the angle because you can get a really fine point as well as a wider brush stroke. So it's a very diverse type of brush. They're not super crazy expensive, but they're also not the cheapest brush you can get. The reason you do want to spend a little bit more on a brush is because if you get the cheapest brush you can get, when you're illustrating, the glues are different. So as you're illustrating, sometimes the little bristles will come out and you will have break hair all over your drawing. That's really annoying. These are really nice. They stay together. Well, I've had some of these for years and I haven't had any issues. Never put them in warm water. If you put them in warm water, it loosens the glue which holds the bristles in there. So that's going to make them fall out and fall apart and break over time. When it comes to washing your brushes, it's not super important to be really thorough about washing them with soap and water or anything. It's just important that you run some with water when you're done. Like I said before, I never put them in hot water. I never rinse them in warm water. In the next step we're going to add some color, so some things you want to get your watercolor ready. Also I always make sure to have a paper towel just to blot anything you might mess up with watercolor or to just check your color. So keep that and have water obviously and your brush. You don't need to clean your palette ever because watercolor, you just add water and it brings your color back to life. When you mix all these colors around here, some people are like, "Oh, why is your palette so messy?" But you can go back and add water and get the colors that you already mixed before and reuse them. So I'm going to start by doing the basic blacks on her look just to get down the really simple part of it. The way I do black is you can use a black paint. But I prefer to mix colors to make black just because it makes the color a little more interesting and adds a depth to it that you don't necessarily get with just a plain solid black. How I mix black is I take a deep brown and I'll mix it with a dark blue. So like a royal blue. Now I have this deep, it's almost black, but it's has a brownish tint to it. Don't ever be scared you're going to mess up because you can only start over or if you do mess up, just keep going and see how it turns out because a lot of the time I will mess up a lot and you just got to keep going and you work it into your piece and figure out a way to make it look right. Watercolor is tough sometimes because you need to think about what's going to be the lighter colors first as opposed to something like acrylic where you can go back and add white. So I added in her top, just really simple. It's okay if you miss some spots. It adds a little texture to it. Then I'm going to use the same color for her hair. It's nice to add the dark part there and then go and add more to her hair. So now what you want to do is sometimes you can take your paint again, maybe add a little bit more color to it, and then go back and add some shadows. Like underneath her arm there's a shadow, which really makes your painting more interesting. Then her hair is a little bit wet still but you can go back and add some more darkness on the bottom part just to show a little shadow. Again, be just as loose with watercolor as you are with your pencil and just go with it and try not to think too much about it. So now we're going to add a little bit of shading to her face and clean up that area. You want to wait until your drawing is a little bit dry, where you put the hair just so you don't smear it at all. I'm going to actually go in and lighten up the outline of her face a little bit with my kneaded eraser. So I'm going to go on and use a color I already have on here. It's just really a mix of a brown and a blue, but a lighter version. So there's a lot more water in it, so it's a shade of this, but much lighter. So really a rule with watercolor is when you're adding more water, your color is going to be lighter as if you're adding white. So now I'm going to take that color and put it under her jaw line to add a little shadow to the shape of her face and the back of her neck. Again, you don't need too much detail on this because it's bow dress and you're keeping it really simple, just give it that and that's her face. I'm going to add a little color to her face. To do this, you just want to use a little bit of red and a lot of water. Sometimes you can even add a little bit of yellow and it'll give it a peachy tone to it. But also just go with your gut. There's no right color to use, it's really up to you. You could add blue-blush looking color and it could be a little more artistic looking too, but I'm going stick with the peachy-red. I like to do that and add the little circle cheek just to add a little interest to the face and the drawing because I don't put that much detail in sketches like these on the face. You can carry that color through, just add a little bit of skin color. The same way you made your black, you can take a little brown and a little bit of blue and that'll make a big range of skin colors. You just add more water or less water to get it darker and lighter. Also, when I do that, I usually add a little bit of a red to give it that rosy color. Then you can go ahead and add a little bit of yellow too. It really depends on the color you want to mix, so just mess around. Skin colors are mainly in the yellows, the reds, the blues, and the browns though, but you can always add green and get a hint of an olive tone. For a larger area, you really want to add a lot of water to whatever color you're mixing just because it's easier to cover the area. Especially since I usually stick with one brush for my whole painting, it makes it easier to spread it with a smaller brush. Make sure you get a lot of water. I'm going to do a deep blackish-blue. Some of that black that you've already mixed, you just add more blue to it and you can get that color right away. Once you get the color, make sure you get tons of water, and then I'm going to just start laying this color down. As you're working with watercolor, if you feel like you've messed up or you've put down a color and you don't like this look of the harsh line there, just grab some more water and add the water and brush it out a little and it'll get rid of any lines or you can pick up some of that watercolor with the water. If you really don't like the color you've put down, just put a ton of water on it right away and then just blot it with your paper towel and they'll pick up a lot of that color. I'm going to add a little bit more blue just to get a more of the midnight color. Then I'm going to go back and add more color, and again, lots of water. Just go with the lines that you've already drawn, fill it in a bit. But an important part of watercolor is keeping the texture in there. It adds so much to your illustration that you want to keep that in consistency to add texture. I'm going to add a little bit more color on the top to show where the volume's coming from, and just pull the watercolor down the dress as if again, the way it's going down. You really want to emphasize that with your lines. Towards the bottom, I always outline that a little bit, but not too much, just really lightly show that there may be a shadow under there from the light going down on her. In the photo, her skirt's really dark. It's dark black, but I like to keep it a little bit lighter just so you can see more color in the illustration, and it again, adds more interest than having just a really dark skirt. But it really depends on what you want and what do you want the final outcome to be. I have the base color down on her skirt, and you can leave it like that and add embellishment for the pattern, or sometimes I'll do a watercolor pattern and then embellishments on top of that, which adds a double dimension to it. So what I'm going do is just take a little bit more of that color, add a little more blue to get a deeper color for the pattern. Then you really just want to be really light and just draw little flower type things here. Don't worry if they're fading away, that adds to the look of it. The wetter your paper is, the more your color is going to disperse over it. For instance, here you can see this area's really wet from the base layer. The flowers I'm drawing are just basically blue blobs. But over here, it's a little more dry so they're standing out more. You really just have to play around with your paper and the color and see what works for you, what you like, what you don't like. Towards the bottom here, I'm just going to add a little shoe with that blue color. But you don't really need to do too much with that, it's just a little suggestion that her legs sticking out a little. Then I'm going to take some of that skin color I mixed before with the red and blue and a little yellow and then put it on. Make sure you use a lot of water and keep your skin color. Whatever shade you're using, just use a lot of water so it doesn't overpower your illustration. It's just a hint at the shade of her skin. If you ever run into any issues with, sometimes I'll splatter paint on the background and I'm like, how do you get that out? You just take a bunch of water, and like I said before, you can rub that color out, and then you just blot it with your paper towel. If you keep doing that, you should be able to get majority of that color out if you do it quickly right after it happens. When you're storing your brushes, make sure that you clean them, face down. But whenever you're done with your brush, you want to wipe it off and then store it face up. Because you don't want these bristles to get bent.
4. Q&A Session (Optional): Hey, guys. I'm glad that I finally got this figured out. Sorry for all the technical difficulties and making you guys wait around. Now that I'm finally here, I can answer your questions. I've been going through all of the projects you guys have been posting, and I'm completely overwhelmed because there's so many things to comment on, which is amazing because you guys are all really into it. You're all doing the projects, which is getting me really excited. Just even the hashtag is pretty cool because there's so many photos. I love seeing throughout the day what you guys are doing and what you're updating, and it's inspiring to me to see what you're doing because you're doing things that I would normally do, it's just cool. I'm learning from you guys just as much. So to answer some your questions, since I'll keep this fairly short, I'll just go through and answer what I think people want to know. One thing people have been asking me about is, they're scared of people stealing their work. They're putting it online. There are posting it, and there was one comment about Society6 and how larger uploading the files and the fact that people can get those. I worried a lot about that in the past, and even when I did use watermarks, it doesn't matter. I haven't used them anymore because I used them and people were still stealing my art work. I had one company, if you follow my blog, you may have seen me post about it, and they took one of my paintings that had a watermark on it, it was an original, and they had somebody Photoshopped out the watermark, which is totally easy to do. Sorry, I just got totally sidetracked. So I just think you shouldn't worry too much about that. It's about putting the work out there and getting people's eyes on it and sharing it with people. People are going to steal at the end of the day. People steal my stuff a lot and there's nothing I can really do about it. We live in this digital world and you can't really bog yourself down with that because there's not too much to be done. The best thing you can do is, when you have uploaded on your own site or whatever, just upload screenshots of it so it's not high-res. I don't personally upload high-res images to my website just because it's pointless to, you don't need to. People can steal them that way. Next question. Let's see. I'm going to try to focus on the stuff that's not too technical right away, and then I'll do that next. Resources. Some of you have asked, where do I get resources for the poses and different ways to illustrate? I use Pinterest mainly. I have a private board for poses where I store. I look all over the Internet and I find fashion editorials and posts, I just pin all these images to my Pinterest board. Whenever I'm stuck or I don't know what to do or I want a new pose, because it's easy to get stuck doing the same three purposes, which I've been in lately, and if you haven't noticed, it's just good to get out there and see what else you can do and get inspired again. So Pinterest is a great thing for that. Scanning. I can show you, I use this magic wand scanner, which is super small. I first got it when I was traveling a lot last year and it was just impossible for me to scan things. I was always taking bad photos and trying to Photoshop them and make them look nice for my site, and I just got this because it's easy, it's quick, it's all good. They are about $99. They're cheaper than your average scanner, but they're not the best scanner you can get, but they worked for me. Most of the images you see on my website are all scanned with that, and it gets 300 DPI and 600 DPI. I almost always do the high resolution because you want to get as much detail as you can in your scans just because you've done all that work to make it look good. What else? Removing mistakes. I've gone into the more technical stuff already, so I'll just go with it. Removing mistakes that you make on the computer. Sometimes when I'm illustrating, I am drinking coffee or something and, occasionally, if it's not your paint that just splatter, you can get something on your paper and you want to clean up the background a little bit. I do that all the time. What you do is, I do pull it into Photoshop and I clean up the backgrounds, make them white and look nice and awesome. So that's an easy way to do that, and it's not cheating at all. A lot of people think that, once you've done an illustration, you have to post it as it is or it's not the real thing, but I always pull mine into Photoshop and clean up the background just because I, especially, like a really white stock background. I'm not going to get that from real paper and scanning it in. What else? Printing. A lot of people have asked about printing and how I go about selling prints and stuff like that. Personally, I've always done it myself. I bought a nice printer. I have an Epson R1 900. It's great. It's awesome, but, now, at this point, it's a little overwhelming for me to produce on my own prints. So I'm actually currently looking to have somebody else print them for me. But I think, in the beginning, it's the best thing to do. You're printing things to order and you don't want to have a big inventory or have to order 50 of each print because you don't know if you're going to sell them. So I like to do it as the orders comes in. That's a good way to do it. Then a lot of people asked me about Etsy vs Big Cartel. Etsy is perfect if you're just starting out. I started on Etsy and it's great because there's a community. People can search you and find you, and it's just a good way to get your work out there, in a way. That was great for me. It gives people the chance to leave you feedback, which is important in the beginning because people don't know who you are. They want to know other people bought stuff and they got it or they got it on time or if it was quality and worth the money. So Etsy is great for that, but if you're selling a higher volume of prints, then I would say Big Cartel's better. That's what I switched to last year, just because it's cheaper for the seller. It's a one-time fee every month instead of, Etsy, who charges you per item. That's what I have to say about those. It's give and take for both. Big Cartel doesn't have as big of a community and they're not super evolved in that sense. It's more like you're bringing them traffic, and they just give you a really nice space to sell yourself and make it look pretty and all that stuff. I think that's it for those things. Some of them are technical stuff. Some people are asking where I get crystals and things like that. If you look in the PDFs, I have a link in there that tells you where you can get crystals and stuff like that, and those are at Artbeads.com, which I love. They're easy and simple. Some people are asking, is it okay to use mixed media? I am a huge fan of mixed media, as you know. I think that it's really up to you. There's no rules in this, even what I'm telling you, it's just my opinion when we're going through how to illustrate. I've had so many teachers in the past and they've done it differently than me. They taught me their way, but then, as you do it, you figure out your own way. So it's all about just being open to other people's methods, but, along the lines, if something isn't working for you, then don't do it. Find your own way to do it and explore, and that's what it's all about. That's how you begin to create your own style. You just have to love your work a little bit more that way. So if you want to use mixed media and you want to use charcoal in your drawing or anything, really. I remember back in high school I had an art project and I used bleach on just these boards with a color coating on them. The bleach bleached the actual color off, and that was really cool, but you don't figure these things out unless you try anything. So you need to be open to trying new mediums, new whatever if you want to go that route. What else? Facial features. Some people are asking me, they see on my website I do some pretty in-depth illustrations where there's tons of detail in the face and there's just more to it than what I've shown you in the class. Those are two totally different types of drawings. The ones that we're doing in the class that I demonstrated, we call that [inaudible] sketch. That's a fashion illustration sketch. I do those and they're pretty quick. I don't put a lot of detail on my face because those are about the clothes. What else? When I'm doing something more detailed, that's going to be totally different. I'm going to spend a lot of time on the face. To answer the question, getting back to that, you can use whatever amount of facial features you want. It's really up to you. They're different types of sketches and some days, you only have 10 minutes to do some things, some days you have hours. It really depends what your goal is for your drawing. Illustrating white gowns and stuff like that. People are wondering, how did you do that? How do you show that? It's white, you're working on white paper. I'm going to post a follow-up to this with links to some drawings I've done. Basically, you just add in shades of colors, you do really super water-diluted colors. Sometimes I do a light blue for a shadow, and that really pops out. It gives the illusion that it's white, but if you look at somebody wearing white dress, there's still shadows on it and there's different shades of the white. It's not just that one white. A good way to do this is to look at this white curtains in the back of me and you can see there's different colors within that white. Just look at things and think about them not just as being one that's called pink stroke. Same as if you look at someone's face, there's a whole lot of different colors in that. In my face now from the screen, there's blues and reds, and just all different colors. You've got to think that way and less of "It's white, how do I illustrate that?" Let's see. I'll post some links about this afterwards, but I did some paintings of lipstick and they don't have any pencil lines on them. That's because I didn't use pencil, I just directly painted. Those were painted sketches, I guess. It's totally cool, you don't have to sketch before you paint. You can do whatever you want and sometimes, it's almost more freeing to illustrate just paint directly on the paper and not think about a pre-thought out sketch. I think it's important to try that once in a while. It changes how you think a little bit. Then what else? How much water to use? It's up to you. If you wanted a light-like color, use a lot more water. If you want a darker and more pigmented color, use less water. That's the role of watercolor and it's pretty simple to understand once you start using it a lot. If you're going for white, use a lot of water. If you are going for deep red or something, don't use as much. But still, you can use a lot of water and get a pigmented color if you use a lot of paint. I think that was about most of the questions that I wanted to touch on except one more thing, is that somebody posted about having a fear of blank paper. Yeah, we all get that. Especially if you have expensive paper in front of you, you're freaked out. You're like, "I don't want to mess up this paper," but Deng's quote, which is, I'm going to get super corny, but it's saying "You never know unless you try." It's true about this too. You can't just have your white piece of paper there and have nothing on it. You really need to just not care, and let loose, and just do it. If you're scared, you're going to mess up your paper, then just practice on cheap paper, so there's nothing to lose. Nobody is going to be mad if you mess up a piece of paper. Just go for it, and do it, and keep doing what you guys are doing. I love your work. I'm going to keep going through and commenting on everything as much as I can. I look forward to seeing all of watercolors. I've started seeing a lot of them on the hashtag and Instagram, which is paper fashion class, if you want to add to that. I'm so glad so many of you are using glitter and I'm sure you're realizing how much of a message it is. I always have it on me, it's all over my apartment. It's too pretty not to use. That's about it. If you have any other questions, just write them in the discussion board and I'll try to answer them as much as I can. One more thing, I almost forgot, I wanted to show you how to remove the paper from the watercolor blocks. I have a palette brush that I use for that, but you can use any dull knife, any dull anything. You just stick it in this part here, and then just pull it along the edges, and then your paper's off. You want to be careful with that. I just did it really quickly, but I do it 99 times at a day. Just be careful because you don't want to rip your paper. I use this palette knife which you can get any art store. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys got something out of this. Let me know if you have anymore questions, and I can't wait to see the rest of the class and how it turns out. Cool.
5. Finishing Touches: In the third section we're going to talk about adding different embellishments to your illustration if you'd like to bring a little bit more depth and dimension to it. I mean, personally it's my favorite part. As you know, I do use glitter quite often for my drawings. I use Martha Stewart glitter, mainly because she makes every color you could ever imagine and it's just a really nice quality. If you go to arts and crafts section or at an art store, and there's usually a thicker course glitter. That doesn't come off so well because it's so big and it dulls over time. But these really fine glitters are what gives you a really cool look. What I use to apply the glitter, I stick with the same brand, I use Martha Stewart. There are a couple of different kinds you can get. There's this glue pen which has more of a felt tip on it, which is nice for covering a thicker area or a larger area. Then there's also the same thing, but it's a ballpoint pen. It's just like you're drawing and then you just add glitter on after. Another thing I like to use are Swarovski crystals. They're a big step up from glitter. They're a little more pricey, but they make a really beautiful drawing. I get the flat back crystals, so they're easier to apply to your drawing. I have various sizes. It really depends on what you want. What I applied those with it's a Swarovski elements crystal glue. Glitter glue is a surface, comparable to a glue stick. But the Swarovski crystal glue is more like a gel. But sequins are a little tricky because even a little bit of static energy can make them stick to everything in your hands and get a little messy, but they make a really pretty look on your drawing as well. For those, I use the same glue as the crystals, the Swarovski elements glue. If you want to add black ink to your drawings, there are two different kinds I use. This is a Micron. I typically stick with a really small tip one so you can get extra details on there. These are nice because they're permanent. You can draw them on and then paint over it and it will never bleed. So that's good. Then the Parker pen is something I've recently started using a lot. You can replace different color inks. It's a really nice, old school style pen. What's really pretty about it is when you do put water over it the ink bleeds, but it bleeds, it looks really nice and it gives it a extra artistic look to it. Now we're ready with our drawing to add a little extra sparkle to it. I really want to focus on the pattern on her skirt and bring that out. For this one, I'm going to do it with glitter. You want to take your glue pen, and I'm going to use the fine tip felt pen, and you just want to use it just like a pencil or pen and apply it where you want the glitter to go. For this, I'm going to be really sketchy with it and o that pattern again. You want to press it down every now and then just to make sure there's glue coming out. With these pens, the glue starts out blue. Don't worry, that'll dry clear. But it shows you where you're putting it. I'm just going to sketch over my little pattern. Probably, I don't know, two minutes before it's dry and then you can't put the glitter on it anymore. So you want to be quick about it. Now I'm going to use this color, like a silvery midnight blue. You just want to tap the bottle as you're putting it on. You can even use two hands and just be really light with higher you're sprinkling it, and don't just dump it in one spot. I also like to do a gradient sometimes, so I'll put more towards the top and then as you go down, lift your glitter a little bit higher so it's not getting as much on one spot. Once you have your glitter on there, you going to let it sit for a second. Glitter is something that can be really messy so you want to make sure you keep it confine, keep it on your paper. If it goes everywhere, which has happened to me a million times, just good luck cleaning it up. I keep all my excess glitter in here and just mix all the colors. So if I ever need a multi-colored glitter, I can just use this. You just want to bend your drawing, and tap your drawing, and it'll start coming off on here. Now I have the glitter off and as you see it's in a gradient where it's a little more filled in up top and then it goes a little lighter down to the bottom. I like how it turned out. I don't really put anything on top of it. The glitter usually stays pretty well with just that glue if you put a light layer on there. Then if you want to add any details to this to finish it, sometimes I'll use a pen and just add some really small detail lines to, again, add just a little bit more interest to the drawing. I'm going to go in and lightly go over where I sketch and add some extra line, and then towards the bottom, I like to cull out the bottom shape of the skirt a little bit. It's also nice if you have different pen tips, you can even get a thicker line down here. But I usually just stick with the thin. Then at this point, you want to sign your work. Wherever, and then your illustrations finished. So you can see how we translated this look from the runway to your illustration. Yeah, it's a little bit different, but you still get that same idea. If you ever look at a designer's sketch from concept to creation, it's always a little bit different because, I mean, you're working with different mediums here, but you want to just get the idea down on the paper. Especially if you're illustrating your own idea. Just getting down that main part, which is the skirt here, is the most important thing.
6. Bonus Tips for the Final Look: This glue is a little bit like a hot glue consistency. You just want to dot it where you want your sequins to go. You want to be quick with this glue because you don't want it to get too dry. So to apply them, I usually use a sewing needle. I just think it works well for, I mean, there are a million different things you could use, but for me this works. You can either just take your fingers and scatter them on and press down to stick them where the glue is, or you can apply them more individually and keep it a little more controlled. Now I'm going to add just a couple yellow ones. We have the sequins on there and it really adds some texture. I'm not even going to fill them in where I put all the glue. So I'll just let that dry or you can scrape it off with the needle. But not really necessary because it's going to disappear as it dries. So same thing, just add some glue where you want it. For crystals, sometimes they take a little bit longer to place. So you might want to start by adding glue as you go instead of doing it all at once. To place these, I usually use a pair of tweezers, which you can get at any drug store. I think a theme throughout whatever I add to my drawings, I do it in aggregated way. I like to start out with small crystals and build them up as I go down. You just want to take them with their tweezers and place it on the glue. Make sure you really got it on the glue so it sticks because especially the Swarovski crystals, you really don't want them to fall off. You want to really stick them on there and press them down. It's nice to spread them out a bit just so you don't get too many and cover up your drawing. You really want to compliment your drawing with them, you don't want to overpower it, so you just want to apply a few as you go. If you really want to get creative, you can start mixing different elements on your drawings. Like I think this could look really nice with sequins too, just to give it a lot more visual interest. So I'm going to use various sizes and colors and mix them.
Katie Rodgers, Artist
