Back to the Drawing Board

It's been a couple of months since the last post, but I've actually got the urge to write again now, yay! So on to the topic at hand:

This term at school, we've had quite a lot of lessons on sketching and design. So much so that I think I've spent more time with a pen or a brush in hand than actually sewing this year. Although I love sewing and getting to work on things in practice, I enjoy the design process as well and certainly haven't minded the emphasis on design. I used to draw a lot more but somehow other things took precedence and nowadays it's mostly to illustrate my designs, not art.

I also had the chance to take part in a pretty exciting project this spring and have been working mostly on that for the last couple of weeks: I'm getting to show my first mini collection at a real fashion show! Here's a small sneak peek to my sketches:

Nothing too impressive, but serves its purpose. And intentionally not showing much since I wouldn't wish to spoil the surprise.

Someone once wrote that every one of us has a stack of a thousand bad drawings that we just need to get through before we can start creating art. I think I'm closing in on number 500 by now. I may not be an artist (yet), but I love good quality art supplies. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to produce a drawing with limited skill AND poor quality tools. Although they don't replace skill, quality products can aid quite a bit.

Nowadays I carry with me three cases of pencils whenever there's drawing to do at school: sketching pencils, coloured pencils and another set of coloured pencils that I'll get back to in a bit. My sketching pencils are these:

Academy pencils from Derwent. Derwent is a quality manufacturer based in the UK, but these are an economy product. I use pencils only for sketching, not for producing finished art, so I haven't found the need to invest more money in them. They have a range from 6B to 5H and suit me just fine.

My choice of coloured pencils was based heavily on the fact that these, Polychromos Colour Pencils by Faber-Castell, are sold both in tins as well as separately, so when I run out of some colours, I can just replace those. I always tend to use black, dark red and dark blue the most, for example. Also, if I find my package of 24 to be lacking a shade I wish to use often, I can just buy that to supplement my set instead of having to invest in a 36- or 72-piece set with countless redundant shades.

I personally prefer bold, vibrant colours and prefer to have good control of where it's going on the paper. This is why I never liked watercolours: the brush seems to have a mind of its own, and the colours end up looking diluted more often than not. Mixing colours proves difficult as well if you need to paint any area larger than can be done without picking up more colour. Coloured pencils, on the other hand, have good control, mixing colours is easy and you don't need additional equipment like water or brushes. However, coloured pencils aren't very good with dark shades either. Or so I thought until I bought this set. Cheap ones tend to have hard lead with very little pigment, so to make anything other than pastel shades, you need to press pretty hard on the paper, often damaging it. The lead on these is much softer, thus easier to apply to paper, and nicely pigmented. Quality products make it easier to achieve the results you're aiming for.

These are my new favourite medium: the Inktense pencils from Derwent. They're a lot like watercolour pencils, but instead of watercolour, they turn into ink when you apply water to them. The main difference is that once these dry, they're permanent and going over them with more water won't smear them any further. You can layer different colours or the same colour again to draw transparent materials and it also makes it near impossible to smear the lines between different colours accidentally. The colours you get are, as the name says, very intense and take little trouble to produce. In my experience the colour also dissolves easier into water than with watercolour pencils and doesn't leave pencil strokes on the paper.

When I got the Inktense pencils, I also got this handy little thing:

The waterbrush is a paintbrush with a small container for water in its handle. Using this, I don't need a separate cup for water and it's perfect to use with the Inktenses. The brush is plastic and tapers into a fine tip, and even though this one's Derwent's medium brush, I find no need for a smaller brush even for detailed work. The container doesn't hold very much water, but it lasts for surprisingly long. I'd say I could finish about 3 or 4 A4 sized sketches without a refill. I find the flow to be quite suitable for me, maybe a tad too strong when the container is close to empty and softer to squeeze accidentally. Because the water flows through the brush and not up and down like normally, it's incredibly easy to clean: just stroke a piece of scrap paper once or twice and you're done. For 7 to 9 euros, the waterbrush is a bargain for how useful it is. I'm inclined to buy another to try using it for applying eye shadow. I often use a wet brush to apply it anyway to get a good cover so this could ease my morning routine as well.


I think anyone working in fashion design should know how to draw at least reasonably well. There will most certainly be times when one must be able to convey their designs to someone, be it a client, a coworker, the boss or for example a supplier of materials. Illustration makes it so much easier to get on the same page, and not being able to depict your designs so that other people can get a peek at your thoughts can cause much unnecessary trouble through miss-communication. It's perfectly ok to take a critical look at your work and consider yourself bad at it, but to come to that conclusion and to be satisfied with it, without even an attempt to better oneself... that, in my view, is quite an unfortunate solution. Finding media that I like, reading tutorials in books and online, taking courses and, most importantly, practice, has helped me out on my journey towards art. It takes effort, but it's surely worth it!