Exercise Four
For this exercise I took a trip into London. I packed light for better movability, taking a small sketchbook and a few pens and pencils that I hoped would make decision making easier under the pressure to work quickly. I had attempted a sketchbook exercise in London before and found it to be incredibly difficult to draw from life. Everything and everyone moves fast around you, as a result I didn't start with the best confidence in the success of this trip.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that drawing the fashion on location was something I just wasn't ready for. I believe it takes a different ability in being able to capture people and their fashion on location. I chose to be on foot around Trafalgar Square, which in hindsight probably wasn't the best locations to base myself as a complete novice. I had attempted a few sketches, but very quickly realised I was a fish out of water and well out of my depth. I should have chosen a calm location, perhaps sitting in a trendy coffee shop would have been less overwhelming. I could have persevered but instead quit the idea of drawing people from life.
Once home from the trip, I opted to finding photos online from London Fashion Week. The street styling at these events are usually very creative and inspiring, so felt this would have worked well for the exercise. Not only did I look at photos, but also found a channel that recorded street style around London. This felt as close to being in the city myself but with the benefits of controlling the time for each outfit.
To recreate the limitations and challenges of drawing from life, I decided to set a timer on each sketch for no longer than 30 seconds to a minute, hoping for a near accurate representation of what drawing from life would be. These time limits were not completely new to me as it is often used as warm-up times during life drawing events, so I felt comfortable with this challenge.
To begin I worked through some of the videos by Curiosity Street Style. Instead of working in a sketchbook, I used standard A4 printer paper. I find this to be easier to work fast on, it's a large enough page and I don't need to worry about making it look good for a sketchbook (not that that should matter...).
I found blog websites that post about individual styles they spot on the streets. I chose to look through this rather than Pinterest which is typically where I would lose all time browsing and browsing to the point I forgot what my original search was.
The first blog was "Who What Wear", where I scribbled down some of the outfits snapped across a double page spread.
I then dug up a few shots from pinterest that lead me to the Men's London Fashion Week for Spring/Summer 2023. I was lead to Vogue who had a range of street photography during the event and also Hypebeast. I decided to follow on to Hypebeast as they had around 50 photos I could skip through.
I was really enjoying sketching the looks in a fast paced manor, spending maximum a minute on each. This gave me the feeling of drawing from live, but still having enough time to draw the pose and style without it passing by too quickly in ending with an incomplete drawing.
I was enjoying this a lot and decided to take it a little further and use a fashion illustrator as inspiration. With a little search, I found Richard Haines to be the most resonating artist, not so much for the subject matter but for his line work. His style for fashion was the messy looseness that I always admire and deep down feel to be my calling. After looking at his current works and seeing videos of him talking, I decided to attempt at sketching a few poses in his style.
In many of the illustrations Richard shares on social media, he is often said to be working from photos. It gave me some comfort in knowing that even the loose messy drawing style that looks to have been done in the present moment, live, can sometimes be from photo. I think you can still capture the movement, the gesture when working from life, and it is the loose line work that Richard uses that gives it the energy and life of a moment.
With my own attempt at my small sketchbook drawings, I found myself still working in my own way when using the pencils. I somehow play it safe, albeit in a very rough sketchy way, by creating drawings that have complete lines. Unlike Haines, who appears to use many small lines or one continues flow of line, I am still sketching them and over working them. When I move over to working in pen, I found myself slightly closer to Haines with a combination of the small and long lines. I still feel I needed to simplify the drawing to less lines.
Looking at his portfolio that can be found on the Agency website, I picked out two pieces that stood out for me. One was a striking pose with good silhouette, the second looked to be a queue of 4 men each in similar poses with the arm in pocket.
From these, I was inspired to try a more "editorial" style image. I kept the searching short and to the point, and found two images I thought would be fun to work with. This time I changed the sketchbook and the tools. I went for a pen nib and ink, hoping to get somewhere close to the first image above in black and white.
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