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.
