Practicum at Pastourelle: Day 6 - Flats all Day Flats All Night, and I couldn't be happier!

This will probably be a rather short entry as not much has happened since last week. 

Susan is away inspecting and visiting production factories in China, so Fran was the only one to work with us today. Casey and I have begun drawing out our computerized flats and we showed what we had. She was really pleased with the quality of our flats as well.

I must say, my flats have improved tenfold thanks to a gathers, ruffle, and trim brush set that I downloaded form mypracticalskills.com. There, I was able to buy a file that consisted of all the beautiful and pre-drawn embellishments for my flats to come out FLAWLESS.

I seriously have never drawn better flats in my life, I'm so serious!

Let me let the preview do the talking...

I swear, these look just as good as what I draw by hand and I never thought I would ever think that about my computer flats! I was never able to draw gathers, shirring lines, rusching, or ruffles properly on my own. I never liked how they turned out when I did them in the past. Whenever I made my own brushes, they looked really unprofessional and didn't flow nicely, and they took me a lot of time to make (and only for lack luster results). 

I was devastated initially at the thought of doing all these elaborate flats by computer, and now I'm actually having fun drawing these and I don't want to stop! I've already gotten through 6 of the Marionette Masquerade flats and it's only been 3 days! It may not sound like much but that's a huge improvement. With this brush set I'm able to draw out my styles in record time, about 30 minutes per flat, that without these brushes would have tacked an hour onto that time easily. 

At this rate, I'll have all these flats knocked out before next week...just when I thought this would take me an eternity, an eternity full of tears and frustration, I instead made lemonade from my lemons so to speak!

I like drawing dresses on the computer so much that I will probably never go back to hand flats, and with good purpose, as the children's wear industry is highly CAD based.

The next skill I want to work on is creating custom prints and graphics beautifully and efficiently.

Now I figure that the more difficult part of this project will be rendering 20 figures to coordinate with these! Along with the figures I need to do for Fashion Art. I'll be rendering 32 figures in about 7-8 weeks, yikes!

Thus is why I'm being disciplined and spending a portion of everyday doing something for this project until it's done. EVERY DAY. At least one flat per day until they're done, and then one figure per day until they're done - of course doing as much as I can when I actually can. 

Right now, it's all about balancing the workload.

Anyway, until next week when we meet back in class, I'll have my flats and fabric ideas by then to share.