Tuesday 19 May 2009

Kelly Smith fashion Illustration


I have always been a fan of fashion illustrators such as Garance Dore and David Downtown who illustrated the Ellwand book: Fairieality. Yet recently I found another muse: Kelly Smith. Her drawings are beautiful! I am currently looking into purchasing one of her beautiful fashion illustrations.

Kelly Smith lives and works in Tasmania, Australia and graduated from the Tasmanian school of Art in 2006. She now works as a freelance portrait and fashion illustrator. Her work has been featured in the likes of Vogue AU and its not hard to see why with her quirky drawings of this seasons looks from designers such as Chanel and Nina Ricci and her beautiful portraits of etheral models like Sasha Pivovarova. I love the captions for some of the drawings for example 'Twiglet' under this beautiful drawing of Natalia Vodianova sprouting twigs. I love her ability to capture the expressions of the faces and the romantic, gentle feel to her pictures as well as her attention to detail and beautiful drawings of outfits. Her subtle use of pencils to create the figures contrast to her use of almost newspaper print to make, for example the bodice in the picture below and some of the animals she includes in her drawings. She has mulitple talents including graphic design, photography, printmaking but her preferred medium is drawing. One of my favourite things about her pictures is her combination of female beauty with nature, I particularly like her print 'I love you my deer' as I find deer an inspiration for my own fashion work and I had a pet deer as a child.




I follow her blog obsessively where she comments of different fashions and posts photographs of style as well as integrating some of her own work: http://kjsdesign.blogspot.com/ She also has her own website, Birdy and Me, with a link to her shop, where you can buy copies or actual drawings of hers, which I would strongly recommend visiting: http://www.birdyandme.com.au/

For anyone lucky enough to live in Melbourne, Australia, Kelly has an exhibition coming up from the 26th of May to the 1st of June with a fellow fashion illustrator Kelly Thompson. After enquiring about purchasing one of her drawings Kelly told me that after the exhibition 'A tale of Two Kellys' she will be putting up the sketches that have not sold onto her website. I will be waiting impatiently until then!

No comments:

Please e-mail me any comments or questions to: caroline@druitt.com