On Saturday the 18th of October I travelled to Kensington High Street on the tube with my Mum to visit Guru Make-Up Emporium. We arrived quite late so only had about half an hour to browse and left with a waterproof black liquid eyeliner, nude lip liner, waterproof red lip liner and pencil sharpener from Make Up For Ever, as well as an airbrush concealer by Dinair.
In the evening I was forced to attend the 18th birthday party of a friend’s ex-girlfriend. Why I agreed to this I still don’t know as it was one of the biggest wastes of my time – drunk 17 year olds in hideous dresses and heels so high they could barely walk, the cheapest alcohol money could buy and the worst company since I completed work experience in a year 3 primary school class. I left 2 hours early and entirely sober.

   

On the 19th, me and a friend missed our train back to Brighton from Victoria station in London and therefore should have left earlier.

This next week was spent working on my Rough Guide to Brighton and visiting the library looking for fashion drawing books. I first focused on looking at details such as hair, shading and the proportions a ‘perfect’ face should have to be aesthetically pleasing. I especially love the first image shown below as the hairs are drawn individually and draw a lot of attention to such an important feature. I will definitely try drawing hair like this on my fashion sketches.

  I then went on to look at full body drawings. Legs are one of my favourite features of the female form so was drawn to sketches portraying long, thin legs. I love the alien-like figures below as they are incredibly striking yet act as effective mannequins for the clothes.

  On Wednesday the 22nd I spent a good few hours making Har Gow (steamed prawn dumplings), my favourite type of Chinese Dim Sum from scratch. They were delicious however preparing the prawns and folding over the pastry wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done but definitely worth it!

  I then watched some old episodes of Ugly Betty where a couple of fashion drawings were shown which I really liked so took photos for future reference.

  

After travelling back to London on Friday I stayed longer than usual to attend the much anticipated Lady Gaga concert at the O2 on Monday the 26th. I wore a black and silver spiked bra, a black cropped jumper for the journey, a short, black quilted circle skirt, black fishnet tights and my YRU Qozmo platforms (to make me taller as I had a standing ticket). After finding the queue I used my early entry pass to access the shorter queue with the others who had spent £170 for the privilege to be granted access to the stadium before all the regular ticket holders. I ended up being in the 2nd row right in the middle in front of the stage. The concert itself was impeccable and I spent it dancing, singing and making the most of such a unique opportunity.

 This is a video I quickly took on my phone as the train pulled in to Brighton Station:

  After returning to my shared house in Hanover I began planning my essay. I walked down to North Laine and interviewed some shopkeepers to find out information about their businesses which was harder than I’d anticipated because mainly only shop assistants were able to speak to me. However I do feel I gained some insight in the the running of Brighton-specific shops and will use their responses as quotes in my essay to back up any points made.

I  spent most of the night working on moodboards for my group’s WGSN presentation although this was almost completely in vain as the group went on to not use any of the work I had done. One reason why I prefer working alone is that I can concentrate on what I want and need to do and get all the praise for it. Meh. A rough version of the title page moodboard for our ‘Future Human’ trend is below. The rest of the group may not have liked it, but I do and to me that’s all that matters.

The moodboard was completed on Adobe Photoshop CS6. I pasted the photos in to the document from Pinterest and Tumblr and then used the magnetic lasso tool to and eraser to cleanly remove backgrounds from desired images so I could layer them.

The 29th of October was spent finishing my Rough Guide which was incredibly satisfying as I’d had it looming over me for weeks. I do feel that my anxieties of completing things wrong hindered the speed of my work and I will make sure I do not let this happen again. I still need to learn that getting work done and out of the way is always better than leaving it unfinished until close to the deadline – perhaps one day I will realise this but so far I have not. Haha. Here are some images from my Rough Guide:

pencil sketch of beach lamp post   pencil sketches of drain pipe and iron railings + watercolour wash of sea skylinecontrasting pencil sketches of dolls houses in the Toy Museum  fine-liner and watercolour sketch or brightly painted houses + watercolour colour swatch patternshells, pebbles, feathers, wood and seaweed collected from the beachThis is my completed fashion drawing! I am very happy with it as it is unique and I combined lots of inspiration to create it. The hair is my favourite part and it took a while to finish but doesn’t detract from the dress. I used a black fine-liner for the outlines and details and a black and flesh coloured brush felt tip for shading/filling in.

I spent most of the 31st feeling guilty about not completing my Rough Guide on time and I will definitely make sure I don’t submit any work late again this year! I went out with housemates as dressed up as a black cat. So original.