December 14, 2010

• What I don’t know about fashion illustration is a lot.

  
  illustration by coco

  I spent my first hour this morning bouncing around the internet looking for images. I’m woefully ignorant when it comes to this stuff, so it’s always an adventure. I’m especially pleased with my find above (though a lot of it seems more collage than illustration). Her work is a balance of chaos and restraint. In some ways it reminds me of my editor and I; I’m all restraint and she’s all chaos and, between us, we often produce something better than either one.

  I picked up my new old cabinet yesterday. It needs a little more work than I thought; the doors are loose and the glass panel knocks around a bit. Whatever – I love it. There’s another piece there now, a small wardrobe. C says it’s “cheap” but I’m not so sure. In any case, I feel like it would be handy the apartment door to hang coats and stash boots so our outside things don’t turn into an unruly pile of crap. I’ll have to work on him a little today. I’ve also begun looking for sofas. I have a feeling anything second hand will have to come from outside the city. Here, it seems anything more than five years old is immediately dubbed “vintage” and priced at much more than it’s worth. Things like that Deco piece don’t appear for the asking.

  Or should I say, “don’t grow on trees?”

  I have to exorcise the cliches out of my work. All of them. I could get away with it for a while, plead immaturity as a writer – not any more. I know better. The problem is that sometimes, in the moment, it sounds okay and I convince myself that This One Time it’s necessary or appropriate or whatever. But inevitably, when I go back and reread, those are the phrases that make me cringe.

  My resolution for 2011 is to stop making myself cringe.
  g.

   

  • 7:29 am
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