Olga Skazkina

I'm in a total rush but I want to finally post my new illustration. It's inspired by Olga Skazkina's collection and I planned to finish it for Valentine's day. I know I'm more than a week late but just to make me happy, let's pretend today's Valentine's day :)
I hope that each day you love and feel loved in return!

Have a fabulous day 'n' night!
Andrea

Liya Kebede

For me everything is better when I'm listening to music. That's why I'm writing this post to the beats of Adele's songs. Today's illustration is inspired by a photo of the gorgeous Liya Kebede from the magazine Amica Italy. It must be destiny that it's an Italian magazine because my Italian friend Anna is hosting her first ever giveaway so be sure to check out her site and you could win a custom illustration! The girl is mega-super-magnificently talented and you should definitely (I'm starting to realize I use that word too often) see her gorgeous art with your own eyes :).

Happy New Year

Hello dear friends,
first I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. I hope you all celebrated in good company.
I have to say my evening surpassed all my expectations. It was a combination of great friends and listening to an awesome band (whose singer was a David Bowie look alike). What more could a girl wish for? :)

I came across a perfect quote that an amazing artist Red Hong shared on her page and I think you will also like it:
"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever."
-"Make Good Art", Neil Gaiman
On the 1st of January was the 1st birthday of this blog. I'm looking forward to sharing more illustrations with you all, to a year filled with learning about new things and making mistakes.

Art Thursday

Hi dear visitors :)
I have some new illustrations to show you that I did for my project on Skillshare. So here they are:

Inspired by Christian Louboutin's embellished pumps

Inspired by Chanel's shoes

Inspired by Heel Condoms's shoes 

xoxo,

Andrea

September Creativity

Hi everyone!

I can't believe it's September already. The summer flew by so fast. I have so many things I want to draw and not enough time. I think it's time I start thinking about making a cloning machine (it's on my to-do list now).

I signed up again for a new class on Skillshare: The Basics of Painting with Watercolors led by Katie Rodgers. For the class project I have to illustrate shoes made out of different types of materials. For now I did three illustrations; two leather and one suede shoe. I'm looking forward to showing you a couple of illustrations I did recently in my next blog post. Until then check out my Instagram if you want to see my works in progress. 

Inspired by Christian Louboutin's pumps

Inspired by pumps from the Amiclubwear online store

Inspired by Diavolina's shoes

Take care,

Andrea

Skillshare: Illustrating your favorite runway looks

Last week I finished my first online course on Skillshare taught by the talented Katie Rodgers: PaperFashion: Illustrating your favorite runway looks. After admiring her illustrations for a long time I was excited about the opportunity to learn from her. The course lasted for two weeks and has exceeded all my expectations. The first assignment was to create a mood board, then sketch our illustrations followed by watercolor and embellishments for the final sketch. I really can't find the words to describe how happy it made me to get a positive feedback from Katie. It was amazing to see so many beautiful projects, encounter talented people and be surrounded by creativity in such amounts that it made me feel motivated and inspired each day.

Here you can see sketches from my project:

Inspired by Christian Dior's couture collection F/W 2009

Inspired by Elie Saab's RTW collection S/S 2013

Inspired by Elie Saab's RTW collection S/S 2013

I was excited about using glitter for my final sketch. After using it I can honestly say that I love glitter and the feeling is obviously mutual considering the fact that it’s still covering a lot of surfaces in my apartment.  I also ended up using nail decorations for one of my sketches. It was a lucky coincidence that earlier I saw a dress from Alexander McQueen’s collection I really liked and then the next day while I was in a store I saw decorations that would be perfect for imitating the texture of the dress. Eureka!

Inspired by Alexander McQueen's collection F/W 2012-2013

Inspired by Zuhair Murad's RTW collection SS 2011

Yesterday I received one of the best news in my life. I got an e-mail saying that Katie left me a comment. I can’t describe how happy I was when I saw that Katie had chosen me as one of the two winners of her class. This is something I had hoped would happen but after seeing so many amazing projects, I really did not have high hopes of it coming true. So you can imagine my shock (that lasted for a couple of hours) when it happened! I even I thought it was an April 1^st joke. It’s one of the biggest compliments I have ever received because it came from one of my top favorite fashion illustrators. I still feel like jumping up and down for joy!

If you want to see other projects you can go to Skillshare or check out #paperfashionshillshare on Instagram.

Thank you Katie and fellow classmates for such great two weeks!

Andrea