The world of Fashion Illustrations And an epiphany

If you follow me on Pinterest, you will see that I am on a huge 'fashion Illustrations' kick. Well, the cause for this madness can be explained with a story as follows -

 The other day I was in the mood to chill out, browse through magazines, put good music on, just because. It so happened that I went to my library and brought home a few perky magazines. This was one of them.

The January 2012 cover story showed celebrity moms and daughters wearing classic Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla Couture designs. These Indian designers are known for their traditional as well as contemporary clothing, their specialty being Indian Couture (Sarees, Chania Cholis, Ghagra Cholis, Salwar kurtas and so on). They recently completed 25 years into their career and boast of catering to most of India's stylish modern Royal households (Nawabs, Rajas and Rajkumaris along with Bollywood glitterati). Okay, I am coming to the point, just read on.

So I browsed through the cover story and felt an energy in me that I hardly feel, ever. Like there was an epiphany, a realization of sorts. I knew this all along but it dawned on me, rather forcefully that evening that I am not doing what I should with my life. I am made to design. My brain creates designs in my head like an accountant should create balance sheets. It's an inbuilt mechanism somehow. But sadly, I never gave this aspect of my life a fair chance. Even if I know how a garment should look like in my head, I have no skills to translate it into a tangible thing of beauty, even on paper. Tears came to me thinking ten years down the line, I am going to regret this, and I will always think that what if I would have studied design and made a career out of it. What if I would have been successful doing what I love. But if I don’t take any action now, I will never know what could have been of these ‘what ifs’.
So, here it comes – I decided to learn Fashion Design. I haven’t still decided if I want to do a full time course and take the plunge, leaving a job that actually pays me (and I am even doing well at that front). But nonetheless, I have decided that I will learn this art, may be step by step, investing a little time and money for every little step, but I am surely giving it a shot. This realization has made me feel powerful and passionate about something, a feeling I haven’t had in a long long time. It’s liberating of sorts. Maybe if I don’t actually learn to dress other people up, I will at least have a good designer for myself :o). Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? I cried myself to sleep that night, more with excitement and realization than sadness. And I feel so GOOD. I discussed this with a dear friend and he advised me that the first step would be to learn how to draw your ideas, fashion illustrations. And there I went looking for good inspiration and tutorials and hence this board on Pinterest. There is lots of inspiration there but I found Youtube to be a helpful resource in case of tutorials. It has exceptionally good and thoughtful video tutorials for beginners. I am learning people, though my fashion figures look a little more like this right now:

But I will slowly and steadily go to this:

 I really love the first one. It's too pretty and makes me think about Audrey Hepburn somehow.

Check out the image sources here and go visit the pretty boards from which I reppined a few. Take care till next time. Have you had an epiphany similar to this in the recent times? Do you live your dream job? What would you do in a situation like this? I would love to know.