Plate 6 (4). The dress is here finished for a daily paper. Less enterprising dailies have fashion drawings rather like No. 3, much simpler and perhaps a little brisker. But the " hot news " journals like their fashions depicted, as here, on a real Miss Modern. To be sure, season after season, of catching the exact type, which rapidly changes, you want to combine the most salient features of the debutante of the year (whose rich and unscrupulous father has seen to it that her photograph, holding a reception in her railway carriage or snapped at a midnight matinee, daily adorns the gossip column), and of whichever film star most consistently runs her up in publicity. A combination of these two, considerably gingered up, is never far wrong, and certainly there is a freshness and dash about this kind of drawing which is rather pleasing ; and which is bad only if it is lifeless.
It is possible to do this kind of drawing either in line or in half-tone. These processes are explained in some detail in Chapter Nine, but it is enough to say here that, in a daily paper, line is best.
Though not inevitably so, the figures in daily paper fashion drawings are often petite ; and, indeed, it is hard to find, no matter in what publication you look, the elongated 7-foot women who are popularly supposed to represent typical fashionable ladies. The figure here is noticeably shorter than the one in the rough sketch, and at once acquires more vitality and less langour. Her body becomes smaller and so do her hips. The cape, the roses and the lower part of the dress are all exaggerated. She has put on gloves and jewellery and both hands on her hips. The stance has altered and the whole effect is undoubtedly more gay and jaunty. In nine cases out of ten, as has been said before, a drawing of this kind would be done, not from life, but from an inadequate croquis or a description ; so, here, it is less a question of altering the original pose as of inventing a new one.
To get a fresh and vital effect into your finished drawing, the brush should not be used with too much deliberation, and a great variety of thickness should be
aimed at in your lines. Do not bother too much about a flowing continuity of line. Remember that you are drawing a dress which, even if it does actually exist, is not being sold through the medium of your drawing and is not going to be made up from a paper pattern. It is simply to show the kind of thing they are showing in Paris or an amusing idea for a tea-gown. Above all, never forget that if your drawing has every virtue under the sun and is yet not bold, arresting, and lively, it will never hold its own against the advertisement for bladder pills on the one side and for an instalment wireless on the other ; divorces on one page, killings on another. It is in strange, rough company ; it must have strength to survive.
The tone, applied by you with blue pencil, must be used in simple areas. Here, the dress being dark, the hair is left light. If the dress had been white I should have put a tone on the flesh and made the hair black. Certain parts of the cape are left white to give lightness, and there is no need to distinguish between the colour of the roses. I have left the line of chiffon, as it would have disappeared altogether if I had made it black.
The hat lends itself particularly well to the jaunty high-spirited treatment (pi. 7, No. 4). The hat grows smaller, is perched at a crazier angle over a face that has grown pert and alert. The little upstanding collar and huge bow at the neck are typical of the rather extreme accessories that this kind of girl would affect.
Remember that when a drawing is to be reproduced, as this is, as a line block, it does not mean that the whole thing has to be done in lines. Strokes of black as thick as you like can be reproduced; it is only variations of tone that cannot. The tint over the face, but not over the hair, indicates at the same time sunburn and blondness, and this will ingratiate her (not a consideration to be ignored) with the men readers.
Plate 6 (5). The sixpenny and cheaper weeklies devoted to women's interests have almost as large a public as that which takes its fashion from the daily press. The two publics differ in mood rather than in income and station in life. Modesty and daintiness take the place of jaunty sophistication, and the result is something like drawing No. 5. The figure I have drawn here is perhaps a little taller than is general ; the petite is the more usual build. But this has been remedied by making her head bigger. The left hand has been moved and is now less casual, more fragile. The arms are plumper, the wrists smaller. It is in drawings of this type that the peculiar convention, of splaying the first and little fingers, is at its height. Jewellery must never be too fabulous ; something that is likely to be within reach of the reader, if not already in her possession, is better than a valuable piece. The.face must be pretty and young, the nose short, the eyes wide apart and candid in expression, the mouth small ; while the hair should be soft, wavy and well cared for, and not too severe.
Indian ink is used for the outline, and the lace must be consistently and lightly drawn. It is not necessary, unless you are specially told to do so, to draw a particular lace, because the girl who makes up the dress for herself will buy whatever lace she happens to fancy. Do not ink in the eyes too heavily, and never, in a face of this kind, put in the lower lashes. Indeed, do not even put in a continuous line for the lower lid, because it only makes the eyes look hard.
The next thing done to this drawing was to damp the face and put in the flush on the cheeks, taking care not to let the edges get hard. The shading on the hair, the arms, and the hands was done in the same way and at the same time. Next came a light tone over the whole drawing, including everything except the white rose and the bracelet. Finally put in the tone of the dress.
As it will probably be made in an artificial silk lace (wool lace being deemed, as like as not, too dull), it is as well to suggest that it has a shiny surface. The high-lights want to be taken out, rather spottily, with a damp brush, and a few flecks of Process White added here and there over the dark folds will give the feather appearance of lace and avoid the impression of printed silk.
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