Fashionary Illustration Workshop + Metrobooks Exhibition Photo Diary

Guess what! Thanks to the wonderful folks at Fashionary, you can now go check out one of my illustrations on display at Metrobooks in Times Square. They organized an exhibition for the book store's grand opening at Times Square in Causeway Bay featuring 9 other talented illustrators from around the world.

I thought this would be a really good chance for me to make a whole Fashionary blog post as I also got to lead a really amazing fashion illustration workshop with them this past March. It was in the gorgeous newly renovated Page One bookstore in TST. I was really nervous but I spent a few weeks prepping with the awesome team at Fashionary.

This is always my strategy. I always think about this quote by John C Jay, Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, if I have a new project I'm really nervous about: "Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.". I just make sure I do lots of prepping and practicing and set aside time to do so and then I can confidently walk into that project and really feel excited about doing it. This strategy has always served me really well (ok, minus that one time I tried to design a complete wedding suite on Adobe Illustrator, CTRL + ALT + DELETE! I still don't really know how AI works.).

After a short demo, everyone settled down with their own set of watercolours and Fashionary template paper and I lead us with step by step directions on how to create the illustrations, first using pencil to sketch, Copic markers for the skin and then finally watecolour for the clothing.  

We then practiced the face on a separate piece of paper before committing to drawing it on our final illustration, it takes the pressure off and you know what they say, practice makes perfect progress.

Vikki Yau was the other illustrator from the day, she lead the Copic Marker workshop in the afternoon and she's also the editor of Fashionary Hand.

My wonderful students and I! I hope everyone had as much fun at creating their own fashion illustrations as I did teaching the workshop.

And shout out to one of the attendees Alyn for her sweet review and blogpost about the workshop! Thank you so much!

CLICK for photos of the Metrobooks Fashion Illustration Exhibition.

The other illustrators from the exhibition are Andrea Ladstätter, Cate Odson, Carla Han,  Connie Lim, Kira Krylova, Mélique Street, Valerie Chua, Vikki Yau and Yankee Leung.

And you can check out the exhibition starting now at Metrobooks, 9/F Times square, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.

 All photos courtesy of Fashionary.