Late night sketching, couple of pieces from the Gucci S/S collection. Not a real fan of it, but couldn’t find the Fendi collection I actually wanted to draw. I guess high waisted pants are back in for Spring.

Been a very busy couple of weeks. Here are some sketches I managed to do at night before bed.

Went life drawing at Keyhole Sessions yesterday. Keyhole Sessions is a life drawing session in Toronto that is more risque than the usual classical life drawing. They typically have 1 to 3 models in a variety of outfits (or lack thereof) doing poses. Last night’s theme was ‘shag’ so it was a bit more shagedelic than normal. The girl wearing the handlebar moustache standing in for the ‘man’ wierded me out a bit (not the girl, but she was a nice slim girl and the moustache provided too much juxtaposition!)

Clicky click the image above to see the sketches in more detail.

Another Journal piece for the ‘Ask Teri’ column. ‘Ask Teri’ is a question-and-answer column where readers ask the fashion editor, Teri Jones, for her advice on different things.

For this piece, the reader was a 40-something year old lady who said she was a size 12 and fit, and wanted advice on what swimsuit to wear. The editor suggested a few things, including a one-piece with cutouts.

Now, size can be a tricky issue. Being a size 12 does not have to mean a person is fat, and these days it’s even more important to depict various weights as acceptable so long as the person appears healthy. But that being said, in a fashion column, people are usually depicted as extremely thin. So I try to maintain a balance by depicting someone who’s not fashion-model skinny, but who probably isn’t a true size 12 either.

The Journal usually has a fast turnaround – I get the brief on Monday evening and expected to produce 2 – 3 sketches by Tuesday morning. The approvals come some time on Tuesday afternoon and we shoot for a Wednesday morning delivery so that everything can be put together for delivery in the Thursday paper.

Considering the short timeframe, I sometimes do roughs and sometimes I just got straight into a sketch. I did do some roughs for this piece. Roughs are usually not shown to the client, they’re just my own ideas for layouts:

I pick 3 roughs to work on and did them up. Here are the sketches I delivered:

The final artwork was done up in Illustrator and imported in Photoshop for additional touchups and to enhance the soft edges.

Now that Summer is here once again, I figured that I may as well make the most of it by trying to hang outdoors more. One day while eating pizza, my husband and I realized that the little sitting area outside of Bloor-Spadina is actually pretty darn good for people watching. So I brought down my materials (and more pizza) and spent a couple of hours drawing various people who stopped by.

Since I got my tablet, it’s become a lot more pleasant to sit in bed and surf around. One of the apps I use is Pulse, which is a neat news aggregator/reader. I’ve configured it to pull the feeds from some fashion blogs, and I’ve been just drawing people who show up on these blogs. It’s pretty neat since these are, for the most bit, normal people who have been deemed fashionable by whoever runs the websites.

Keyhole sessions - see more images below

Went drawing last night with some friends to the Keyhole Sessions at the Great Hall. The Keyhole Sessions is a cool, edgy life drawing, uh, class, although no one teaches you anything there. They have models who are dressed in more risque outfits, though last night’s selection was actually more towards the ethereal side. The Great Hall is a rather large hall that is hidden away in what looks like another bunch of unassuming townhouses down on Queen Street. It is rather nice,with a large upper balcony that unfortunately we could not go up to.

More images below, click to view.

Was invited for an almost impromptu zoo sketching session yesterday by Mike DelMundo and Vince Chui. We tromped around the Toronto Zoo for most of the day, putting up with temperatures reaching a high of 37 C / 99 F, and then had to put up with an amazing about-face with buckets of rain and hail on the way home! But we did have a great time sketching the animals, and talking about illustration and stuff. Watch the guys’ blogs to see their sketches when they post them!

I drew these some time ago off photos of Beyonce. They were prep work for a project I did recently. They’re mostly as I drew them, with a bit of a touchup to the front pose because I can never seem to draw a frontal face well.

Couple of fashion type sketches I did some time ago. They are tests for moving the ink style towards fashion. Not quite right yet, if anyone wants to comment on them be my guest.

This post is also to test cross posting to my new Tumblr account, which I still don’t really understand but am told that I should use, apparently.