The briefest of glances at my blog would be enough to inform that I LOVE my Fashionary sketch book; I bought my first back in late 2009 and now enjoy using it every day as my personal style diary… so I was pretty thrilled when Vikki from the Fashionary team contacted me to review some of their latest products.
Yes, please!
Fashionary has been around since mid 2009, and is the brainchild of Penter Yip and Vikki Yau. It was developed as a handy tool for fashion designers, to facilitate quick sketching of artistic fashion ideas without having to worry about focusing on getting the proportion of the figures consistently right each and every time.
If you are like me and can’t draw, this is an absolutely brilliant idea!
A new limited edition Fashionary sketch book comes in a range of three new designs featuring the delicate hand-drawn and painted designs by SWASH London. Mine is a cheerful and classy St George’s scarlet, with intricately detailed and tinted, vaguely steam-punk-y designs. It’s a thing of beauty, like a work of art in itself.
It has a very sturdy hard cover with a pleasingly soft, almost suede-like fabric-y texture to it, and comes with a matching elastic closure and ribbon bookmark. The pages are of 100gsm paper, smooth and creamy in colour, and not at all flimsy so drawing and colouring don’t show through to the other side.
Inside the back cover is a handy envelope in which you can store fabric samples, pen, pencils, pencil sharpener and eraser.
Like the standard Fashionary sketch book it has 128 pages with six semi-transparent body templates on each, which are barely-there enough so that they can be used, or not; if the space is needed to write notes or attach fabric samples the figures are pale enough to not interfere with writing or drawing something else on the page instead.
All the Fashionary’s come in both
male and
female versions.
Mary commented that she would consider altering the curves of the figure when sketching, which is a great idea! and is very easy thing to do with these very faintly drawn figures. You only have to draw just inside or outside of the suggested lines to more closely mimic different figure types if you wanted to… just a few examples are as follows, from left:
1, the Fashionary figure drawn just as is;
2, a straight, more rectangular figure can be drawn by going straight down to the hips and not curving in at the hips so much;
3, an inverted triangle “athletic” figure can be drawn by going just outside the lines at the shoulders and upper torso and drawing just inside the lines at the hips;
4, a pear shaped figure is drawn by going just outside the lines at the hip and thigh level;
5; a more rounded figure is achieved by just drawing outside the lines all over;
and 6, a petite, or very slim figure can be drawn by going just inside the lines all over;
… additionally a Monroe-esque hourglass figure could be drawn by drawing outside the lines at bust and hip level and just coming in more sharply at the waist.
Personally when I’m doodling in my Fashionary I’m not so concerned about matching my own figure accurately … if I was then I would be drawing mine more like number four, the pear shaped one! but yeah, I’m not 🙂
The first 36 pages have lots of information for sewing types; such as laundry symbols, a seams and stitches guide, measurement tools, body measurements, fabric dictionary and knitting information; as well as more fashion-student oriented information such as a brand index and the catwalk and trade schedules. I didn’t think I would use these very much, but I’ve found the little drawings of garment types helpful when it comes to drawing my own outfits and also learnt a few things by reading the fabric descriptions, and consulted the laundry and knitting guides, so you never know.
Another new product is also a set of
mini Fashionary sketch books which are really cute and small enough to live permanently in your handbag. These soft-cover booklets are terrific for jotting fashion notes and ideas when you’re maybe visiting a couture exhibition in a gallery in which photography is not allowed, or you’re browsing through a magazine in the hair salon or out and about window shopping, and you see some inspirational detail in RTW that you want to keep in mind for some time down the track. Tell me I’m not the only one who does this!
The pages are perforated so if you want to you can extract them to pin to a corkboard in your sewing room, to jog the old memory and keep motivation up. Personally I like to keep everything nice and intact in the one book, because I’m the nostalgic sort who likes to riffle through my old notebooks from years gone by… but that’s just me 🙂 The point is, you can pull pages out neatly and tidily without ripping or worrying about the other half of the page falling out of the book.
An abbreviated info section is inside the front and back covers; body measurements and some metric/imperial conversions which might be quite useful, and a list of fabrics descriptions. The rest is 102 figures for sketching, one to a page and each the same size as the figures in the standard size Fashionary. The set includes 3 separate little booklets, and I have already started using one for my sewing planning; my sewing promises to myself if you like. It lives in my handbag… and along with a sketch of my idea and jotting pattern and fabric specifics, I’m stapling fabric samples (if I have it already) and making note of haberdashery requirements I’ll need to finish the project. How many times have I come home from the fabric store and as soon as I walked in the front door suddenly remembered that dang! I needed elastic?! … or a beige 20cm zip?! which of course I had forgotten the minute I entered the shop. If this doesn’t keep me organised, nothing will!
