Floral Willow
Pattern: Willow Tank by Grainline Studio
Fabric: Cotton shirting from Stonemountain & Daughter (Laurel Canyon collection by Robert Kaufman)
Sewn Up: Spring 2018
My friend Anne teaches in the National Gallery’s drawing salon – a lovely program where you spend a morning in one of the galleries, doing a series of drawings to help you connect with the art in front of you. She’s guided DC dwellers of all drawing abilities through Calder’s animals, Matisse's cut-outs, and Degas’s dancers. This past December, she taught a salon about Rachel Whiteread’s large-scale resin and plaster casts of room interiors, doors, and furniture. While these works are starker and more abstract than the bright flowers or giraffes of those other salons, I wanted to do something fun and different with my Dad, so I signed us both up.
Anne opened our salon by reminding us that the purpose of drawing, for us in the class anyway, isn’t to create an exact replica of your subject, rather to simply “slow down and look.” I loved this message, and its parallel to what I recall my high school art teacher making us write at the top of our sketchbooks on the first day of class: “I am learning how to see.” I have always enjoyed drawing but haven’t done much these past few years, so as I took Anne’s class, and as I now draw these little clothes, I have been reacquainting myself with this practice of slowing down and looking in the specific way that drawing requires.
Drawing this fabric – one of my first-ever fabric purchases that became my first-ever tank top – revealed quite a few secrets that I hadn’t seen in over a year of wearing it. I noticed that more than 100 flowers sit on one single side of this shirt. I noticed that the print is made of all flat shapes, except for the insides of the flowers, which have a photorealistic texture against white – the only place white shows up in the design. I noticed that while the flowers are mostly pinks and oranges, a few green ones are sprinkled in, and vice versa for the leaves, which are mostly green, but sometimes pink and orange. I loved discovering this play on what we traditionally think of as being the right colors for each of these elements.
Anne’s guidance to both a) look closely and b) not worry over whether you’re getting a true likeness has stayed with me, and I find myself channeling her as I work out these sewing illustrations. First, looking closely: I always start with a rough pencil sketch of the garment capturing what I see as it lies flat on the floor. Where do the print details land relative to the seams? What colors are where? What shape does each pattern piece take on?
Then: drawing in earnest, without worrying too much about the original garment. I bring a photograph of my sketch into Illustrator, where I redraw it digitally with the pen tool, a vector drawing tool that lets you carefully place and adjust every point and curve on every line. This way of drawing is meticulous and slow, but is the only way I have found that gives me the fine motor control I wish my hand-drawing hands had. During this step, I rarely look at the garment. Instead, I’m moving shapes around guided by the pencil lines and my own sense of what feels like it’s sitting in the right spot on the page. At the end I look back at the original to help me choose my colors, and I always find that my drawing has more spirit than letter-of-the-law accuracy to the garment. Rather than 100 flowers, this drawing has about 50; rather than a photorealistic texture, these flower-centers have a grid of criss-crossed lines. More purple background shows on my drawing than on the real thing.
The last line in my notes from our morning in the drawing salon reads: “drawing an idea > what it actually looks like” (> signifying “greater than”). To me, the idea of this Willow is: “cheerful garden of a shirt that I made with my own hands.” Even though the drawing is not an exact likeness, I think the idea is there!
The drawing salon experience my Dad and I had with Anne as our guide was one of our best times together ever that I can remember. We both felt so good having spent 2.5 hours in the quiet gallery rubbing pink conte against blue paper to capture the shadows and lines and gestures we observed. My Dad confessed afterward that he hadn’t done a real drawing in 40 years, which made me realize how lucky I am that I draw, or design, or sew, almost every day. I think we are all meant to express ourselves creatively in whatever form inspires us, and things like Anne’s class, or the sewing class I took at Stitch, are such gifts for making that possible.
My drawing on the left, my dad’s on the right, Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture against the wall.
~ Photos by Lizzie Epstein - thanks sis!
Drawing process reel: Closet floor photo, pencil sketch, digital drawing.
