How to be a Fashion Illustrator. Using pressed flowers

Hi all! I hope you've been keeping up with my newest drawings and designs, I've been working super hard lately, the good news is i'm going on Holiday in August to Portugal (Faro, The Algarve)  so that will be a nice break! I get asked a lot about my drawing techniques and the way I illustrate, so I decided I'd put together a tutorial for everyone to see, I do things my own way and I experiment a lot until i'm satisfied, the beautiful thing about illustration is that there aren't many rules, It's finished when you say it is, and you can make it how you want to, so keep that in mind, follow what I do or just use a few techniques.

Ok, so first things first, I knew I wanted to decorate this image with pressed flowers (see my blog post on how to press flowers really quickly) So I needed to draw my model in a pose which was pretty relaxed, not too formal and a little interesting, I started my illustration digitally, drawing out all of her body, you may think i've wasted time drawing all of her out and then covering her with petals but you have a lot more freedom to move your flowers around all over the body if it's all completed, if I were to leave the torso and thighs unfinished I may have regretted it if I was going for an asymmetric style.
You wont believe how much of a difference shadows make, if you're into make-up think contouring, exaggerate shadows to emphasise the highlights, I always make the roots on the hair slightly darker and add shadows under the jaw, collar bones and wrists. Once i was happy with my design I printed it out and started to add the finishing touches!

 I collected some flowers, here I've used pale pink role petals, when pressed they had a beautiful colour to them, the little yellow ends had a more saturated colour and they pastel pink was very delicate, I also a had a lot of other flowers to choose from as I pressed a lot to see what kind of look I wanted, I overlaid petals, added pressed buttercups and went through a million different kinds of flower, some looked super dramatic and a little over-whelming, others looked very delicate and feminine like this one!

The Purple flowers were too bright for me, I felt like the suffocated my drawing a little, which is a shame as I adored the colours.

The possibilities are endless with flowers, i'd love to create a range of these to frame and sell, What do you think of the tutorial? I'll be adding a video shortly to show you the process! Thanks for reading x