The Start of the Beginning (Part 1)

After slogging and slogging after bookish knowledge all these years, I feel like I've suddenly grown wings over night. My Fashion Design (FD) classes really make me amazed...engg had been full of rules and fat books. All of a sudden I'm attending classes where there are no rules, limits and boundaries...and most importantly no books. Just lots of hand work and creativity floating all around. 

The first few weeks of my FD classes were a real whirlwind with a flurry of activities...but, each and every activity and assignment done by me in those few weeks are wonderful memories to me...so, I would like to share them with all of you.

The day of my first class, I was brimming with confidence...atleast that's what I looked like to everyone around me. But, on the inside I was a nervous wreck! I had no idea what to expect from the classes...Apart from getting a few compliments from friends and family on my drawing, dress & design sense I never really got a chance to actually connect to fashion before.

My first ever class was "Fashion Illustration". This was one class where the professor was quite strict and made sure we got an assg to do every week...but, she also makes sure we get perfect at everything she teaches us. It went on to become my favorite class btw. 

For our first assignment, we had to do write-ups about two Indian and two International, well-known fashion designers and stick up magazine cutouts pictures of their clothes....I chose Ritu Kumar and Manish Arora for the Indian designers and Valentino, Christian Dior for the international ones:

Somehow, I'm not very happy with the way Valentino's collage has turned up...blame it on those deficient magazines which are all deprived of Valentino's opulence. Christian Dior's could've have been better too...but, this time, there was an excess of Dior in all the magazines. I had a tough time deciding on the right pictures. I think something went wrong with my picture selection....

So, yeah, after this, we started off with practising the basics, just to get our hands used to free drawing...so, we went on to do interpretation of lines and curves, and then worked on negative and positive spaces and then came to pencil shading. 

Interpretation of lines

Interpretation of curves

pencil shading

Finally, after weeks of waiting, we started out with figure drawing...but, nothing to be happy about that, I realized pretty soon. First we were made to do umpteen number of mechanical figures....and then another equal number of fleshouts from the mechanical figures! 

Mechanical

Flesh out

And then, after getting our minds numb from all the mechanical work, we were finally made to practise free-hand figures...phew. And just this week, we actually started on the colouring part of it. The lack of colour in the drawings was making me really depressed. After a meagre body rendering technique, we started shading for basic clothing patterns using different mediums.

Basic Clothes

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Phew...That was one tedious post. Took me hours to make it. And I'm not done with it yet! Sorry for making it so long readers. I'm covering two months worth of classes before coming to the current scenario. But once I'm done with flashback, I promise to take a break from going on and on about classes and assignments...

Part 2 will be up tomorrow :)

The Start of the Beginning (Part 2)