Sunny Gu

Sunny Gu was born in China but moved to America when she was 13. She started painting and drawing as a hobby since she was young. As she grew she encountered people from various of backgrounds, this triggered her curiosity for other cultures. She learnt to observe and discover beauties in everything around her. She lived in the United States in Alhambra which is near Los Angeles where she could see all the fashionistars and their good sense of style. She inspired from California and tended to illustrate people tropical outfits. She has always interested by bright colours and intricate details which led her into job as illustrator. She has drawn for as long as she can remember. Drawing and painting have always been her favourite things to do. Even though she may be drawing stick figures and crayon doodles when she was little, every practice has contributed and has paved away to her artistic growth. However, even though other people say her works are perfect, she points out things that she can improve on. She normally uses watercolour because she love the vibrancy and the unpredictable nature of watercolour. Occasionally she used graphite or acrylic paint to render some of special textures.

Fab Ciraolo

Fab Ciraolo born in Chile and his pieces combine re-imagined elements of nostalgic popular culture with fantastical sci-fi standards and beautiful space-like atmospheres. Incorporating classic cartoon characters, fairy tale favorites and edgy popular icons, Ciraolo constructs compelling and enchanting artwork that stirs up whimsical feelings for the past while keeping one foot forward. He started to illustrating since he can remember and his background was always around arts. His parents always encouraged him to keep illustrating and advice him to always stay true to what he loves and to what he needs to happy. He uses traditional painting, drawing, acrylics, colour pencils to create his work. He used coffee for painting and he said coffee is good to make cool texture. Cartoons were always in his mind, when he was little he would draw all of them by hand, so one day it just came to him. Drawing He-Man in a flower suit, he just did it and the result was interesting and fun to him. So he keeps digging in all these characters making them more fashionable, always wondering how will they look in cool suits and jackets and tight pants— hipster looks. He wasn't inventing something out of this world, just giving a little twist to things that were in his mind a long time ago. He loves to mix the old with the modern, giving things that already exist a new fresh air, a new vision. He is working in these series, with Frida, Che Guevara and Dalí, it is the result of all these things that are in his mind. This is the main idea of all of these. He mixes them with all the images that are inside his head and it is like an explosion of images that he needs to get out and put them together in one piece.

 

 

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. 

Katie Rodgers

Katie has been on the receiving end of a number of enviable commissions of late – most recently she worked with Coach for New York’s Fashion’s Night Out where she appeared in store and illustrated a number of handbags for a line of eager customers. She grew up in Loganville, Georgia, which is definitely not the most fashionable place on earth, but She still loves it. She now lives and works in Boston. She works at Reebok as an apparel designer during the day, and run PaperFashion (a fashion illustration blog and business) in her spare time. She wanted to major in cello and design but in the end she chose design. She studied Industrial Design at Carnegie Mellon University.This lead her to focus on fashion. All of these experiences have definitely given her the knowledge and drive to be where she is now. She never sets out to be an apparel designer, or an illustrator, but somehow she was on a path to get here. 

Hayden Williams

Hayden Williams' energy is pretty infectious: Through his vibrant, idealized illustrations of women, the illustrator has become a phenom for his signature, amazon silhouette.

"One woman even said to me, 'Is it weird that I want to look like your sketches?'" Williams laughs. The fact that Rihanna used his uncommissioned portrait as her Twitter profile picture sealed his sought-after status.

At the mere age of 20, Williams is a student and aspiring fashion designer, and claims his passion for illustration manifested itself at the tender age of three. "As a child, I was obsessed with Disney movies, and I would constantly draw the animated female characters until they looked up to my standards, which was nothing less than perfect," says Williams. "All those years of drawing the female form [made for a] natural progression into fashion illustration and design as a teen."

Cédric Rivrain

Cédric Rivrain was born in France and has been drawn since he was 18 years old. He has illustrated and designed for prestigious fashion houses including John Galliano, Martine Sitbon and Yazbukey. He grew up in the medical environment and combine that environment with fashion.His first illustration was actually a double spread for Dazed and Confused. His friend Yaz Bukey, the jewellery and accessories designer, was offered this double spread to express herself. His friends inspire him a lot. He likes them for their beauty, their strength, their sensitivity, their inner world,
their creativity and their slight craziness. He also got a lot of his inspiration from his childhood, the mix of cultures his mother and father gave him were both very different. His father was a passionate doctor and his mother was a very feminine woman who dressed in designer clothes and to whom appearance was very important. He grew up in a house full of antique medical books, illustrations, models and instruments. He guesses drawing is his way of immortalising the particular culture his parents gave him. The significance the anatomical plays for him can be seen in the band-aids adorning some of his subjects, it’s all that is covering their bodies or faces, as Cédric favours nudes over designer clothing. Through bandage and dissection he distances himself from fashion to uncover its inherent beauty. Drawings is his first solo exhibition at the Brachfeld Gallery in Paris and he has previously shown at Maria Luisa, Le Bon Marché and Christie’s and contributed to publications as diverse as Tokion, Numéro and A magazine.

Eduard Erlikh

Erlikh was born in the Moscow and now live in New York City. He studied painting, sculpture and theater design in Moscow and illustration in NYC. He has his own signature fashion figure. Unlike other illustrators, he use watercolours. In his illustration, there is no faces and finishing details, instead emphasizing the anglesd movements, and physical expression of the models he prints. From his interview, inspiration for him can come from anything and anyone. From his live models, which are always chosen as much on personality and character as they are for their actual beauty: to shopping trips to the ethnic neighborhoods of the city. The Indian neighborhood of Jackson Heights served an inspiration for his Bhangra series. When American Vogue offered him a contract to create images, his turning point has been started. “Vogue introduced my work to an international audience and offered me a choice to paint from all the latest designers’ collections.” From there, Erlikh went on to illustrate for Vogue Germany, Vogue Japan and so on. He also had collaboration with the German-based Lumas. Erlikh has also designed costumes for several ballet productions, and in fact the Vienna State Opera Museum organized an exhibition of his work titiled Eduard Erlikh and Don Quixote in the spring of 2011. The show featured Erlikh’s drawing from the 1992 production of the ballet, choreographed by former Kirov dancer Elena Tchemichora. These days, there may be a trend towards computer-generated images and a less artisanal approach to illustration, yet Erlikh remains in high demand. He said “ I guess my technical flexibility as an artist allows me to create very different looks for different clients. “ Eduard Erlikh ‘s work and his life are the epitome of elegance and his illustrations are the perfect expressions of his indisputable sense of style.