I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not to put any bridal designs online. A friend of mine who has seen them suggested that I may find it helpful blog about my progress – part of what inspired me to blog in the first place.

I feel pretty comfortable blogging about miniature stuff – it’s safe. Reviewing other people’s work and basically playing make-believe whilst pretending to be a grown up!

But now I actually come to share some designs with people outside of my tiny comfort circle, I’m scared. The same friend told me I should watermark/copyright the designs if I’m adding them to a blog. So I’ve done that at his suggestion, not because I think they’re remotely good enough to be pinched!

I’m so inexperienced and below even novice level with this whole thing! I’ve gone back to the very first designs I did today, thinking that I’d find a few I was happy to post. But looking through them, all I could see was very poorly executed, naive and primitive sketches. I’ve bravely picked the best of a bad bunch to show where I started.

I drew the figures free-hand from templates I’d found online and in the books I had. They aren’t at all ground-breaking but everyone has to start somewhere!

Fast forward a few months and past about 30 more sketches to the most recent set. These were done using templates in The PANTONE Fashion Sketchpad, which was a Christmas gift. The figures in here are drawn in such a way that the outlines disappear when scanned or photocopied.

It’s certainly a quicker way of working and takes a lot of the effort out of trying to proportion figures. Indeed I read that the vast majority of designers have one or two ready made figures that they use over and over to create their designs onto.

There are a lot of figures in the book that don’t really lend themselves to slinky, sleek bridal dresses (there’s many a wide stance!) but the ones I found work rather nicely and it may be that I continue to use them for my sketches. But a large part of me wants to create my own figure to use again and again!

So that’s where I am so far. Very much a beginner, with a lot to learn, but getting a lot of pleasure from it!