Earlier this year, we were approached by Jan Mayer and Matt Lawrence of Drawing Cabaret Couture (DCC Studios) to curate a selection of special pastel sets for art students to use during London Fashion Week. It’s safe to say, we jumped at the opportunity.
DCC Studios is a London based production team specialising in creating high fashion films and editorials, all of which are professionally produced from their film and photography studio in east London. Alongside their productions, DCC Studios regularly hold fashion photography workshops and haute couture fashion illustration life drawing classes. For years now, DCC Studios have nurtured hundreds of aspiring artists through their immersive and exciting life drawing classes, especially the truly incredible illustration residency at London Fashion Week.
We were asked to curate a bespoke set of 18 pastels for the students to create captivating works of art on the spot of live runway shows and stunning portraits of models and garments. Understanding that London Fashion Week is arguably one of the most exciting showcases of cutting-edge design and innovation, with every designer intending to shock and provoke with their looks, we knew we needed a versatile palette to capture the variety. So, Matt set about choosing 18 suitable colours from our range of 380 pastels. They selected: Yellow Green Earth 10, Yellow 16, Yellow 9, Yellow 12, Yellow 18. Grey 28, Brown Earth 36, Red Earth 11, Red 9, Orange 1, Natural Earth 11, Brown Earth 7, Dark 24, Blue Violet 12, Blue Green 3, Blue Green 18, Additional 4, and Light 6.
This array of colours was immediately put to use by the art students resulting in many beautiful sketches, some of which we have included here for you to see.
It was such a great honour for us to be asked by DCC to supply our pastels to their students. We join the likes of Faber Castell, Stabilo, Uniball and Posca, so are in truly great company. We even heard from DCC that there a few pastel sets left over, which have been shared with artists attending Paris Fashion Week – we can’t wait to see the outcome from that!
