Watercolour, Landscape, Feedback, Re-evaluate, Rethinking.

I finished a painting today that was for a fashion illustration, I took the inspiration from R/H label's wonderful images on their website, in particular the 3 landscape photos below:

Because I had enjoyed doing the last illustration of "Island" so much and being able to illustrate the landscape, I opted for these latter landscape images as my starting point rather than the studio shots.

I was fairly pleased with the result and even though the model's head was out of the picture I thought this looked okay, after all we are focusing on the dress, and the landscape, which because of the website's choice of images I took to be part of the inspiration for the clothes especially the print of this dress which was called Abi Sky.

I sent it off thinking I'd done a pretty good job, especially pleased that I had done it in watercolours, a medium I have previously feared. Unfortunately, (as will certainly be the case on occasions in this illustration lark), my client did not agree, and thought that the headlessness was not good, (on reflection, for fashion, had a point really!) and that the model should be longer and more elegant. This is something I tend to do, shorten the body a bit, so again, had a point, I have to concede. Feedback also included that it is better not to be too literal with the fashion illustrations in terms of the photographic starting points, that it is better to adapt them, use own ideas etc., which I hadn't really done, I'd merged the sky from one photo with the river photo, and removed the background landscape to include more sky, and that was it really.

This has been a learning curve for me and although we would all love to hear that our pictures are wonderful all the time, it simply cannot be so all the time, as illustrators especially one is working to a remit, and as a fashion illustrator, one of the elements of that remit, is that the body and the clothes are the main focus, I think I got a bit carried away by the landscape. Luckily I have another week due to changes to the client's requirements, to rethink and redo the illustration.

Practising long elegant figures and making sure they have heads for me then!

I still like my picture and as a landscape, more fine art image I think it works well: and here it is for all to see: what do you think?