Gwen Stefani Fashion Illustration with Repaper App

I always noticed Gwen Stefani as a fashion icon with her bold style, but had never paid attention to her music. She was always popping up in the fashion magazines I enjoyed, but I only SAW her, never HEARD her. Just a few years ago, I was invited to sing with a band and had to learn a few of her songs. THEY WERE FREAKIN’ AWESOME! “Underneath it all” and “Settle Down”, they were both reggae based tunes and on youtube I found acoustic, live, and studio versions of the songs.

LOVE LOVE LOVE.

https://instagram.com/p/Bc1EIQoDBz3/

So when she showed up on a recent cover of Marie Claire Magazine, I snatched it up (okay actually I was in a doctor’s office– my dad’s a small-town family doctor and it was free lol) I set about sketching it one night on my iPad Pro. I decided to use Repaper App for these fashion illustrations.

(One version is a pure line drawing, the other has color added. Which one speaks to you more?)

Gwen Stefani fashion illustration with Repaper app: detail above from my Instagram page.

Below, on the screen of the Repaper app. The top right of the screen shows some of the tools in the app: edit, duplicate, delete/trash, and share icons.

When I created the fashion illustration, I knew that I wanted to play on Repaper app that day. Do you think Gwen Stefani would like this piece? She inspired it, but I’m not sure it looks so much like her.

There are a lot of apps I use for illustration and model drawing, Repaper is just one of them, and I promise you, each one of them feels so very very different!!! I discuss my top 3 in depth in my ABOUT FACES freehand ipad fashion illustration course, but ….

Why do I love Repaper app?

Repaper app is one I discovered AFTER created my digital fashion drawing online course. I had bought a tablet called THE SLATE by Repaper app’s creator, ISKN. The Slate is a tablet that you put paper on and then draw on to create DIGITAL sketches on your iPad, tablet, phone, or computer screen– without losing the feel of pencil on paper. It definitely takes practice to create art that way though- I wasn’t crazy about it, even though I thought I would be.

(But that’s for another article) :0)

This sketch I created without the slate, but still using ISKN’s Repaper app, which has become one of my favorite digital painting apps, for its simplicity and texture..

I’m so picky about iPad/ digital apps for fashion illustration. There is usually something that really bugs me about each app, as well as other features that make app stand out as a favorite for one reason or another!!!!

(for example, that deeply textured “rice-paper” that I used in this sketch, is unique to Repaper). I love a natural, organic, fabric -like, gritty feel!

Here are a few of my top-of-mind thoughts on Repaper app for fashion illustrations.

• I love the “rice paper”. In fact, that was the biggest inspiration for this fashion illustration. I wanted to use the RICE PAPER (seen above, it comes in 4 colors: a light golden tone, palest pink, a white, and this deep charcoal) even more than I wanted to sketch Gwen Stefani!
• I love the ability to sketch light- on -dark regularly... it always makes me happy to break away from the “white-paper black pencil” paradigm that makes us feel like we are writing an essay instead of creating images!
• Repaper app for fashion illustration allows you to save your images in a variety of formats (.png, .psd, Jpg, Mp4)
• The time-lapse recording ability is also adjustable: you can decide how long your finished video will be!!! (From 3 seconds to even a few minutes, you can decide. EVEN AFTER YOU HAVE FINISHED THE SKETCH!!!!!) I LOVE that! How fun is THAT for sharing on instagram, facebook and other social media!?
• Repaper app only has a few drawingtools, so you don’t get overwhelmed. I think that’s ESSENTIAL for beginners getting into iPad illustration. Start with clean, simple apps and master just a few tools…. then you can do anything on a complex app because you’ve learned the “language”.
• There’s no watercolor tool, so I use Pastel for coloring in this painting app, used for red and shading here. The other option for “coloring in” is to use the airbrush which.you can see I used it to do the skin tone.
• I used the ink pen in a light color and think linefor the first step, the line drawing. There is a nice pencil tool in this app too, which is something that always wins me over for its sheer, gritty abilities :0)
• My pet peeve is the chisel tip marker: it’s more of a calligraphy pen which I just cannot work into my illustrations. BUT TRY IT FOR YOURSELF TO SEE! It’s very difficult to control and goes from super-thin to super -thick depending on the direction of your line.

ANOTHER VIDEO REPLAY in timelapse: (I love timelapse art creation videos, do you?)

PS_ You can learn block-busting, liberating fashion model drawing techniques for all sizes in my Model Magic Online course. And you can learn EVENINGWEAR fashion design and illustration like this in any media (marker, digital, watercolor, pencils discussed) in Fabric and Flow online course.

Here’s a little bit of video -action for you from the time lapse.

I hope you enjoy!!!

Let me know what you think, and any questions you may have!

Love,