 Hi there. I'm Sandy Olnok and I'm an artist, but I am not a fashion illustrator. I'm celebrating Sunflower Month with some drawings today, but please don't think that I know anything about fashion design, fashion illustration, but I'm going to show you a book that's helping me to get a little bit better at it. Once I get going, I'll talk a little bit about my thoughts on being fashionable, but for now I want to tell you about the sketch pad from Pantone. I got this years ago, and by the way, if you have not subscribed yet, you might want to do that now before you forget. I got this in 2013 and it is a little bit dated because of that, and I'll show you what's dated, but it talks about these things called croquis, rhymes with hokey, and they say that this is the, you know, like secret weapon of fashion designers. I don't know that that's true because I know a lot of fashion designers who could just draw without thinking about it. They don't need templates like this, but this book gives you a lot of information. If you have somebody, a young person in your life who wants to get into fashion design, this is an excellent book. It's got lots of great information in the beginning of it, and the rest of it, of course, is what I care about. I didn't read all of this detail, but there is a lot of detail, a lot of terminology, that sort of thing. I just kind of had fun and did some drawings. Now, these two I did just before today's project, but I did not have a lot of success. I made one that was inspired by a bird outside my window, and the other, I wanted to use some gold ink, and I failed miserably at this. I did my Copic coloring, and then I put the gold over it, and it splooched all over the place. I was using a glass pen, and that didn't work, but I used a brush with some Ph. Martin's white, and that worked really nice for the feathers. But you can see just barely, of course, what the drawings look like on the page. There's some pages that have two figures, large ones like this, and then there's going to be some that have more figures on the page like this one, and that's what I'm going to work on today. Each one of them has colors down the side, and I'm ignoring them because they're like 2013 colors, so it's probably not relevant. But here's one that I did when I first got the sketchbook. Apparently, I was into Batman at the time in 2013, and I drew Batman. There you go. He's standing a little awkwardly. But before I get started, I want you to know this paper does bleed, so you can see on the back side, there's figures going the other direction. You can't use that side if you use Copic markers in the sketchbook. But there's enough pages. I am never going to do enough drawings to use the entire sketchbook anyway, so I'm not worried about it. So my inspiration is Sunflowers because it is Sunflower Month in August every year. I thought it would be fun to do when I bought some Sunflowers when I was at the store the other day, and I thought this one could be good for an inspiration for a couple of figures. And you can see here up close what they look like a little bit better. They are in like a gray tone, a tint, so that you can draw over top of them. And while I am panning over my desk, let me mention the hex chart has been updated, but first realize there are no changes to colors. Colors are in the same places. There are no new colors. It's still the same chart. I just updated the font. And if you want to know how you can get the updated one, if you purchased the other one, then go to my blog. I will write out some instructions for how to do that rather than talk through it here on the YouTubes and the link is in the doobly do. So the first one I decided to do would have a long dress on her. They each have these interesting poses. They're very fashion-y poses, very skinny waist. You could change this size of the people. You could make them look more like a normal human. I decided to try to leave them about the weight that they were drawn at. Let's just say that. And I decided this first one was going to have a feathery kind of dress. It got a little more orange than I had hoped. I wanted to keep more to the sunflower look, but such is life, right? And she has hair that's gonna swoop over similar to the feathers that are in her dress. And as I start working on anything with my Copics, I end up adjusting things, because once I see how the skin tones look versus the depth on the outfit and the depth in the hair, I may adjust things and add more colors to it. Since I'm doing some fashion illustrations, I've been thinking a while I've been sitting here drawing about fashionableness and being hip and cool and having all the hip new cool stuff. And I have to say I recently found a t-shirt in my t-shirt collection that I wore the other day. And I have had that t-shirt I realized since high school. That was decades and decades and decades ago. It's been a long time. I don't throw things out if I like them. I don't care if they're in fashion anymore or if they're cool anymore. I just keep them and use them and I don't worry about it. And I'm kind of the same way with my art. For a number of years, I had gotten sucked into the I must have the newest things, all of the newest products, all of the newest stamps and the newest crafty supplies and everything. And I don't really feel like that is helping me to become a better artist. It's one of the reasons that I stopped doing all that because I was chasing the new I was chasing like whatever everybody else is working on I want to do that. And when I found this book from 2013, it's been around here for that long. It's been on my shelf for a long time. I realized, you know, I don't care if it's an older book. I don't care if the colors are outdated on those tabs. I'm just going to use the book because it's an excuse to learn to draw people better. Now, granted, these are tall, skinny, model like people. And I have no interest in becoming a fashion illustrator. I will leave that to the likes of Holly Nichols and all kinds of other wonderful artists who do that all the time. I don't need to do that. But it's fun to play with it. And since I had a flower and this book in my hand, it seemed a good idea to just play around with turning the sunflower into elements of clothing. And I was thinking about I wonder what this would feel like to wear something that swooshes around the way all these little petals are swooshing on their outfits. So the second girl was just wearing a shorter skirt, more like my length. I don't like mini skirts because I have, let's just say, become successful about the thighs. So she has her thighs nicely covered, even though her legs are little stick legs. And then we have the swimsuit girl I decided we needed something summery. So she's going to have a swimsuit made out of this fluffy stuff, whatever it is that that this would be made of. So she could have an outfit that would be kind of fun to touch. But hopefully no bad people would touch it. It would just be like her kids going, Mommy, that's cool. She also needed some accessories. And so I had fun adding accessories to these. She's going to be carrying a towel. I had to put some stripes on it to cover the arm that I had drawn there should have thought about that before I started putting more in there. But nonetheless, it still worked anyway, just made a darker towel for her. And added some sandals for her feet so she won't have hot toes in the sand. And the last one is a gown. This was the one that I originally just thought I would really love to have this one I would love to be a princess and wear a sunflower gown. Because I think this would be pretty spectacular. I made the swoosh of the gown extra long, trailing on the ground. And it has an opening in the bodice. I thought that would be kind of a nice touch, something different than these other outfits that I had done. And anybody who is a fashion designer who comes upon this, please be forgiving of my language about fashion. I didn't read the front of the book, as I said. And I thought it'd be fun to have some some of the sunflower feathers come up around her neck a bit. But I also wanted to make her top more sparkly because she's a princess. So she needs a little bit more sparkle to it. So once I got her hair in there, I decided she was going to be blonde and have just lots and lots of big hair. And if you know, since I'm going retro and going unfashionable then we'll do big hair. I don't know if anybody does big hair anymore. But she's got big hair. And for the top part of her dress, I'm just doing stippling with a white pen, which is turning it all into something that looks like it's twinkling, a little necklace in the opening in the bodice. And started putting in some more colors down in the skirt. And notice that I've been using some purples and browns in the skirt. The purples are because it's a complementary color. Compliments tend to dull down some of the colors and some of this I wanted to dull down because it got a little too bright. But of course she's a princess. So she needed to have a crown and some pretty earrings. And you can go back into any of these kinds of drawings and just add lots of accessories and jewelry, bracelets on everybody, whatever you want. I will have a link to the book itself in the supply list down below so that in case you are someone who would like to try this book and have some fun with it, you could do that. But you could also draw your own people and just add clothing onto them. And the great thing about fashion design is that like the people don't even have to have faces. My people don't have any faces at all. They just have some shapes there. You put glasses on them if you want something on the face. So that's my little fun for today. Happy relaxation day. Go do some relaxing. And remember that Hex chart information is over on the blog. And I will see you guys later on this week with more fashion on social media as well as we're here on Friday. I think I might try it in watercolor. I'll see you later guys. Bye