See You Next Tuesday

I began to breakdown Cassandra Rhodin’s illustration style by tracing entire illustrations and adding colour to them using the same media she uses: watercolour pencils and paints. I did try outlining with black pen, but realised it wasn’t very effective for me and my illustrations, as I wasn’t very neat with my pen strokes.

I then decided to focus on the facial features of her illustrations: Cassandra Rhodin’s style is dramatic, dark and vintage looking. I love the way she draws the faces of her fashion illustrations and want to incorporate these features into my final illustration, as she does not show very much of the figure or clothing in her images. The bodies she draws are usually heads and shoulders, with flowing, draped clothing and not a lot of detail.

The faces of her illustrations are composed of extremely exaggerated, dark eyes, small noses and big, full lips. The eyebrows are very prominent, the face has a masculine, angled look and the hair has a retro feel to it, which can be seen in the sketches below.

I traced some of Cassandra’s statement faces and used bright watercolour paints to liven up their sombre tone.

Initially, before I attempted to draw the faces free hand, I sketched out the individual features of the face, such as the eyes, nose and lips on a large scale to see if I could capture the different aspects of each, which can be seen in the picture below:

Then, in order to draw the facial features in an actual face size and shape and based on Cassandra Rhodin’s style, I broke down each feature and sketched lines to try and bring the different components in in the correct positions, shown in the pictures below, I also looked at how other bloggers and illustrators had tried to break down her illustrations.

http://carlafinlay.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/breakdown-of-illustration-style.html

The above image was the final outcome of drawing the facial characteristics of a Cassandra Rhodin illustration, which was achieved by drawing the features separately, sketching out the positions on the face and looking at the original illustration.