What A Fashion Photography Degree Taught Me About Fashion Illustration

I’ve drawn all my life, as most of us have, but for some reason the important time of choosing what you want to study at university came at a time I was on a break from drawing.

During the last year of college I focused more on photography and gave drawing the cold shoulder for the first time in 17 years and then because me and photography were in our honeymoon phase, I decided to study fashion photography at university.

Then one year into a 3 year photography degree I realised I missed drawing… so sods law that a major life decision had to be made during the one and only year in my entire life I wasn’t scribbling, so I spent the next 2 years defacing all my own photos.

But I never look back at it with regret, because A) I didn’t know fashion illustration was a thing at that time, and B) studying photography made me understand so many things that I don’t think I would have learnt if I was focused solely on illustration.

So I wanted to take a trip down memory lane and show you some of the work I did at uni when I was 19/20 and show how some elements of photography still stick with me now and help push my fashion illustrations.

I also want this to echo a post I made before about everyone having a different journey to get where they need to, and we all acquire different skill sets along the way.

So don’t fret if you didn’t study illustration but want to become an illustrator, because what you’ve been doing in the meantime just might give you a unique outlook into illustration!

Lighting:

This is one I’m still only experimenting with in my sketches, too nervous to take it into painted work just yet. But photography is light, the light that is hitting the aperture in the cameras lens is what creates a photograph. A lot of photographers have their own specific lighting set ups that become trademarks, even Rembrandt had particular lighting methods in his paintings.

It’s something that isn’t explored all that much in fashion illustration, most of us just draw the person and the garment in full lighting, but when you start toying around with light and shadow, it can tell more of a story, what time of day is it, where am I meant to be looking, where are they?

Posing:

My first love. Posing has always been something I’ve enjoyed experimenting with and in photography it’s what makes the photos. A models job is to pose, to be able to contort their body to create interesting photographs and showcase specific areas of the garment at the same time.

When was the last time you flicked through Vogue and saw every photo of a model just standing there? That’s why it surprises me so many fashion illustrators don’t push their posing. I used to sketch the poses I wanted my models to do and show them, a lot of the time they'd look at it and be like ‘girl, that ain’t possible’ but it got me used to thinking about posing.

Composition:

Lighting and composition are a photographers main tools, what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. Most photographers are shooting what we all see day in day out, it’s how they frame it that makes us reconsider or reevaluate what we see everyday.

So you see an old woman at a bus stop, standard. But when you zoom in on her hands and see she’s on her phone learning to text, or you crop everyone’s torso out and just photograph their feet, what do their shoes say about them. Oh the old woman got on fancy shoes, maybe she’s going somewhere nice.

Composition is a way of focusing the eye and narrative, so don’t feel like everything always needs to be a full body. If the dress has an incredibly intricate neckline, then make the drawing a portrait, utilise it as a tool!

Energy:

Behind posing, this is my second favourite, anyone that’s taken one of my courses is going to know what I’m saying next but… WIND MACHINE!

A wind machine or at least someone wafting a reflector up and down is essential to every fashion photoshoot. Photoshoots are lively places, hustle and bustle, loud upbeat music, people running around, their high energy environments and you want that captured in the photo.

Photographs can look quite stiff and boring when it’s just a model on a backdrop but as soon as they start jumping or have a wind machine next to them, it adds some energy to the photo, the fabric has motion, the hair moves, so I always take this and put it into my drawings pretending theirs a wind machine next to everyone I draw to add a little drama.

Sell the garment:

The no.1 purpose of fashion photography is to sell the garment, these editorials, campaigns, look books, product shots, that’s their main aim. So whilst fashion illustration is no longer used to needed to sell the pieces, the idea of having the garment look its best has stuck with me.

The same way a stylist would be on set to make sure it’s fitting right, ironed, no unsightly wrinkles or creases in weird places, I do it to my illustrations, any wrinkle or fabric fold that is spoiling the shape of it, it’s gone baby! Fashion illustration doesn’t have to be reality, so if the reference shot shows 100 creases, doesn’t mean you have to.

Narrative:

A lot of photography exists within editorials or a series, which means more than one photo makes up the finished piece. So there needs to be a narrative, a link between each photo, something that says they exist together. That can be as simple as same background colour and model, or you can push it further and tell a story with the series of images, similar to a picture book or a comic, each photo leads on from the next and shows a story. Those are usually the strongest editorials.

But even a single image can tell a story, and its what people mean when they say a picture says a thousand words, so I’ve always wanted this to be in my own work and think deeper, who is this person, why are they wearing that, where are they, what are they doing, adding a narrative can be so useful especially for editorial illustration work.

Style:

Photographers shoot a huge variety of clothes, models, backdrops, locations, they can’t just stick to one type and that’s it, but they still have a running theme of their style throughout, which made me understand art style in a broader sense.

A lot of illustrators feel like their style is watercolour, or it’s drawing everyone with green skin or it’s drawing lips a specific way, photographers can’t cherry pick in the same way how something is depicted. But their portfolio still has a consistent thread that runs through it, and that’s because it’s their eye, their vision of something, their outlook on things.

Look at one of my fave photographers, David LaChapelle, huge variety of subjects but still has a consistent visual thread, look at directors, Quentin Tarantino’s films aren’t all the exact same, they have different actors, settings, time periods, stories, but they have a Tarantino look and style.

So our art styles are deeper than the surface level things we think they are. My art style might be circles, one eye, closed eye, abstract, but if that was the case how can I draw a still life and people still know it’s my work? The approach and outlook we have on things as artists is far deeper than a quick tick list of style quirks.

Reference Photos:

No matter what images are on your moodboard, it’s incredibly difficult to mimic something in photography exactly, I can’t exactly book Kate Moss and jump on the Eurostar to Paris to recreate the Dior campaign, student loans didn’t quite stretch that far.

So fashion photography is all about creating something through collaboration, you have to decide on casting, styling, background, lighting. You have an idea of what you want in your head but you need to start piecing together all these different elements to try and get as close to what you see in your head as possible.

This process of nothing existing but an idea and you having to figure it out piece by piece has stuck with me with my illustrations, because I never look at a reference photo and just mimic it, I take one reference picture and piece it with a look from a runway show, then add in a background from a photo I took on holiday and maybe an expression from another photo.

This act of piecing things together myself to create something means whatever I draw is original and not a mimic of someone else’s work, which is really important when it comes to becoming your own artist.