Watercolor Travel Outfits: Your Packing Plan's New Best Friend
Prefer to watch this blog post instead?
This week I’m sharing about painting travel outfits. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I’m a HUGE fan of fashion, and I have designed and sewn lots of my own creations over the years. I also had a jewelry brand for about 5 years, hand-crafting my own work which sold in a couple of shops on the Las Vegas strip. But as a designer, one of my favorite things was the artistry, which means I just loved seeing my designs, and other big designer looks, come alive in illustrations.
Fun fact: I’ve actually licensed a fashion illustration course to a school in San Francisco for kids, and I have 6 classes on Skillshare related to fashion illustration, loaded with tips and project ideas.
In fact, I have one in particular you might be interested in for this week’s topic. Skillshare class, Fashion Illustration: Watercolor Fashion Sets, a celebration of fashion magazine layouts turned watercolor paintings. So many amazing student projects were shared!
Honestly, you don’t have to be a fashion lover to appreciate fashion illustration. There are lots of uses for this craft besides fashion design and editorials. Like surface design, book illustration, art prints, fabric mockups, greeting cards, and so many more. But the one I'd like to talk about today is the task of planning what to wear for your summer trips.
I remember having week-long or more trips that I need to plan outfits for and being just downright confused. Which top went with which skirt, went with which shoes? I couldn't keep track of it all in my head, so I needed a much more effective approach that saved me time and energy, while reducing anxiety and overwhelm. In our busy lives, who wouldn't want more of that!
In fact, did you know that doing something creative can lower anxiety by over 70%? And this isn’t just an isolated statistic. It’s found in a number of research studies done around terminal and mental illnesses, showing how art can increase health and wellbeing for everyone involved. I'll share more about this in a later video, but in the meantime, know that you can decrease your travel anxiety with a little bit of painting thrown into the mix.
A project from Skillshare class, Fashion Illustration: Watercolor Fashion Sets,
But I digress… Getting back to packing, I started to create fashion illustrations with my watercolors, to keep it all straight. I sketched out my outfits on a piece of paper, then painted them and even added some pattern design to be sure that all my items actually went well together and didn’t get too busy looking. This ended up being so much fun and had me looking forward to packing every time!
Here are some easy steps you can use to get started:
Sketch out the items you think you want to pack.
Either do all your sketches on one piece of paper so you can see your clothing choices all together, and/or cut them out so you can move them around.
Paint the items you have left, after you’ve ruled out any that won’t work
You can outline them for a crisper look, or not outline them for a more realistic look.
Now check to see if your wardrobe will work for the entire length of your trip, or not. Maybe you've discovered you need to purchase additional items, or take some things away, because you can mix and match instead.
I honestly think that as visual people, adding an element of sketching and painting to tasks you don't particularly love, can really turn them into something you don’t mind doing. Who knows, you might even learn to like or love it.
If you do decide to cut out your illustrations to see if you can mix and match your outfits and shoes, it could help you save space while you're traveling to lighten that suitcase. This is an added layer of convenience for you that once again will save you packing time, money on clothing, and energy on having to think and rethink your choices. Maybe you could even save that $50 for the extra weight in your suitcase, when you're traveling by plane? Maybe…. ;-)
But really it’s about feeling more organized and put together. This practice can help you relax and enjoy your trips more. And when you’re more relaxed, you might feel more like painting while on your trip!
Something else I've done is to paint the outfits I wore after coming back from travelling, as a way of recording those special memories. Travel journals are perfect for this, and you can even turn these projects into art prints to hang up on a wall, or bulletin board. This is a great social media post idea too, because most people love travel related shares!
Here are some of my other fashion illustration themed classes on Skillshare. Click the image or on this link to see all my Skillshare classes!
If you haven’t already, I would love for you to join us in the Your Watercolor Summer low-pressure weekly painting challenge to get more tips, more videos lessons like this one, a challenge community to share your work, a challenge hub to keep it all organized and where I feature the paintings you’re sharing on Instagram and in the Facebook group.
Prefer to watch this post as a video? Just click the button below, and don’t forget to subscribe while you’re there so you don’t miss any videos!