David Downton

David Downton was born in Kent, in the south of England in 1959. He studied at Canterbury and Wolverhampton. He worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from advertising and packaging to illustrating fiction, cook books and, occasionally, fashion. In 1996, he started to draw at the couture shows and became popular as a fashion illustrator. He worked with Tiffany & Co, Bloomingdales, Barney’s, Harrods, Top Shop, Chanel, Dior, L’Oreal, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, V Magazine and the V&A Museum. He thinks most important things of fashion are the sense of the body in the clothes, proportion, colours and details. He uses watercolour or gouache for small scale pieces. If he needs flat saturated colour he uses cut paper collage and then applies line using an acetate overlay. He uses black Indian ink on acetate or paper to do the pure line drawing. He draws whenever there is a chance that the model will stay still, backstage or at fittings sometimes even in the car between shows.