Fashion illustration workshop

When I heard that Glasgow School of Art were organising some free art workshops at fashion retailer Jigsaw, I signed up straight away for the fashion illustration workshop!

The weather had turned nasty a little while earlier, which may be what put the other participants off coming - I was the only one there! But this meant that I got my very own one-to-one lesson, and was able to do more than if there had been lots of people there. There were two students there, one who ran the workshop and drew at an easel alongside me, and the other who modelled.

We began by drawing using a continuous line, drawing both the outline of the figure and trying to capture some of the details of the clothing. We did a few of these, and then tried some other techniques like holding the pencil at arms length and moving the whole body, holding the pencil in the crook of the arm, drawing with the non-dominant hand, drawing without looking at the paper, and drawing with two hands at once, one hand drawing the top of the figure and the other the bottom.

We also did an outline drawing on a large piece of paper, then added stylised arms, hands and face to this, and used one of the patterns from the model's clothing to do a continuous line pattern using oil pastel, and added a line of oil pastel down one side of the figure.

Then came the really fun bit - creating our own collage papers. There were a selection of different coloured papers, oil pastels, pens etc, and the idea was to base the designs on the patterns of the fabrics the model was wearing.

After making the collage papers, we used these by tearing them to the rough shapes of the clothing the model was wearing, and gluing them in place on a large piece of paper, then adding details with a pen.

Then it was a chance to experiment, by tearing the papers into shapes and seeing what type of clothing they looked like, sticking them down and adding details.

Finally it was a chance to use my favourite techniques of those I'd learned, to create another picture of the model.

I loved the idea of making my own collage papers - I've done this before with stamping, but hadn't thought of just hand-drawing them. I also liked trying some looser styles of drawing and collage than I'm used to. I love some of the illustrations I did, and it gave me some ideas of how I can draw figures in a quick, stylised way. So it was a great class and I learned a lot from it. I just wish the other people who'd booked had turned up, as I was looking forward to meeting other arty people and seeing how differently everyone's versions of the same thing turned out.