Working With Photoshop

Antonio Lopez and Roger Duncan

Antonio Lopez

Antonio Lopez was a big fashion illustrator in the 70's. He was known as the Picasso of fashion illustration. He captured the pulse of style from the 60s to the 80s, and is still revered as the most inspiring illustrator by today’s practitioners. He worked with a variety of materials including pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, watercolor and polaroid film. His work appeared frequently in Vogue, Harper’s bazzar, Elle. 

In the early 60’s Antonio free-lanced for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. By the end of the decade Paris beckoned where he soon established both career and a lifestyle that saw him surrounded by an entourage of beautiful men and women. Antonio was known to be the number one unpaid model scout in Europe. When he called an agent or a designer suggesting a new face, they didn’t hesitate. Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Donna Mitchell, Grace Jones – all became a part of the Lopez group of beautiful people who frequented the clubs of Paris, particularly the Paris disco Club Sept.

Returning to New York during the middle of the 70s, Antonio’s work appeared in almost every fashion publication of the decade on both sides of the Atlantic. His work was always evolving and he used a variety of materials – pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, watercolor – often combining several within the same image. His unique style of illustration injected a sense of movement and energy that had been missing from the medium and he joins company with past illustrators like Erte, Bolin, Dali, and others who have had a hand in raising fashion illustration to an art form. 

The reason I like his style as it is very free and minimal. He's line work captures the drape of the fabric effortlessly and is really inspiring. It definitely catches the purpose of it and draws you in. 

Roger Duncan

There was a shape and feeling in Duncan’s dynamic brushstrokes and glowing gouache colours, which, coupled with his ability to capture a likeness in just a few lines, were much appreciated by American Vogue. They regularly commissioned from him both fashion drawings and portraits of elegantly dressed socialites.

I love Rogers pieces, they definitely fit the Parisian Chic style with the classyness and rough sketchiness of it. I definitely want to give with style ago when it comes to my illustrations. I love how its not precisely neat gives it and edge of the Parisian style. How it looks classic. 

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau (1880 – 1910) was a reaction to academic art through the use of organic forms, curved lines, and unity with the natural environment. People embraced it by bringing this decorative style into their households and supporting it in the fine arts as well. A new style that rejected the imitation of the past. Art Nouveau embraced new materials and electrical lighting as well as modern industrialization. It is a blending of art which included art glass, painting and sculpture. A period of great exploration and the embrace of returning to nature. Art and the objects of art become a part of the interior. It was a style that was very ornamental, but it was not based on past historical design and it always referenced nature. Below are pictures that highlight "a new style for a new age". I personally find the style the quirky and very appealing. As to whether it fits my Parisian Chic I am uncertain yet, I will need to make some mock screen prints with the Art Nouveau style. 

I have started looking pattern inspiration for the Art Nouveau. I am loving how the pattern is really twisting and curving. 

A French designer I have took interest in is Louis Majorelle. I came across him whilst looking for Art Nouveau inspiration. Louis Majorelle was a French decorator and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs, in the French tradition of the cabinet making. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in the Art Nouveau style. The Majorelle firm's factory was designed by famous École de Nancy architect Lucien Weissenburger in the western part of Nancy. In the 1880s Majorelle turned out pastiches of Louis XV furniture styles, which he exhibited in 1894 at the Exposition d'Art Décoratif et Industriel [Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Art] in Nancy, but the influence of the glass- and furniture-maker Emile Gallé, inspired him to take his production in new directions. Beginning in the 1890s, Majorelle's furniture, embellished with inlays, took their inspiration from nature: stems of plants, waterlily leaves, tendrils, dragonflies. Before 1900 he added a metalworking atelier to the workshops, to produce drawerpulls and mounts in keeping with the fluid lines of his woodwork. His studio also was responsible for the ironwork of balconies, staircase railings, and exterior details on many buildings in Nancy at the turn of the twentieth century. Some of his original woodwork designs can still be found in Grand Hotel Moderne, Lourdes. Often collaborating on lamp designs with the Daum Frères glassworks of Nancy, he helped make the city one of the European centers of Art Nouveau. At the apogee of the Belle époque, during the 1900 Paris World's Fair,  Majorelle's designs triumphed. By 1910, Majorelle had opened shops for his furniture in Nancy, Paris, Lyon, and Lille.