My Fashion Illustration - Urban Textures!

I have earlier posted about fashion illustrations and showed you the artists that I admire, Holly Mae Gooch is one of my favourite. I have now been set a task to create my own fashion illustration adding the use of digital media and using the theme of urban textures....I started by taking some manual rubbings from urban/man made materials ......

I then starting thinking of my illustration and came up with the idea that I would create a photo shoot around the urban textures theme..... I started by sketching down some thoughts and ideas and came up with my final idea.... I wanted to project an PowerPoint presentation of
 urban textures onto a mass amount of draping material. I created a scene in which a beautiful model was leaning out of a high inner city window with her hooded cloak draping down from her to the floor and spread out in the aim of projecting onto it..... Having my final idea I set out bringing all the components needed to finalise the actual photo shoot......
 I chose an urban setting for my location, in Bristol inner-city Fire training tower ....

I had to get a number of permissions from the officials at the fire station as is is an active training tower.... a health and safety risk assessment was carried out on the tower specifically for this photo shoot so that everyone involved would be safe...especially the model who would be climbing ladders and harnessed to a safety rope from the inside......

I visualized the model being sat leaning out of one of the highest windows, innocent looking......Her long, draping, hooded cape falling from her to the floor....I knew that by creating my illustration on a large scale I would come across some obstacles.....the first Major one was finding the amount of material that I would need as I wanted it to be wide and long. Luckily I came across a whole roll of shiny, white, nylon material at the local scrap store and brought it for only £4..... I cut three pieces equally 30meters long and sewed in the side seams together to make the material 7meters wide... I added a hood and made a complementary dress for the model to wear over her harness......

I then went around Bristol taking photographs of urban textures to put into my PowerPoint presentation......

I then organised a professional photographer to attend the photo shoot and take the shots on the day of the photo shoot .... Stephen Tilley ( http://www.stephentilleyphotography.com/).....

I also arranged my sister to be the model so everything was organised for the actual day....

I designed the hair and make-up to complement the setting and theme of the shoot.... giving her tumbling, curly locks and bright, white and innocent looking make-up......

When we arrived on location I went up the tower to the third floor and placed my model position advising her on different poses and looks..... a firefighter fixed her into the harness and attached her to the building, he stayed hidden in the tower throughout the shoot... I then went back down to the ground with the photographer to direct the photo shoot.....

I then came across my 2nd major obstacle - the projection I created wouldn't show up during daylight onto my material.... I had to think on the spot, so I decided to carry on with the photo shoot then add extra urban textures into the final image using photoshop... the location was already an urban inner-city setting....so after the shoot Stephen and I sat down to photoshop to create the final images...

This picture is a long shot of the whole setting, I did this to show the scale of my illustration....the only thing I have changed on here is the colouring of the sky, it brings a dramatic effect to the image.....

Here I added buildings and cranes into the skyline of this photo to give more urban textures to the outcome... I also let the material blow up in the wind to create a swooping curve....

I got experimenting with photoshop and added different impacts of sky in the background.... I feel here I have created a 'repunzel' style outcome....

Again here I have only selected the model and the tower and put her in a scary looking wood and carries on with the 'repunzel' look.

I also had the whole day filmed to capture the organising and production of the day, I wanted to make a documentary of myself and how I work... I will be posting the edited version of this documentary on a later date.......

I actually think that my outcome was more effective without the projection onto the material as the whiteness and length is the feature and I feel that maybe this would be lost if the projection had covered up brightness of it....Overall I'm very pleased with the final images of my illustration and I can use the projection idea in another one of my photo shoots.