For my exhibit, I chose Victorian era dresses because I always had an interest in Victoria era fashion, but never really did too much research on it. I was astonished to find that fashion had much of a deeper meaning in the 1800’s than I though, especially to women at the time.

When doing my research, I mostly used wikipedia to find my information. For picture references, I used various references pictures that showed timelines of how the Victorian fashion era evolved over the years.

I chose to display the dresses as if they were being wore by mannequins, hence the lack of face and expressions. However, I wanted to make it look like they were “interacting” with each other, because in a lot Victorian era drawings and paintings it shows them gathering together, so I thought it would be neat to incorporate that into the museum exhibit.

I chose to display a range of different dresses from the different years to display the progression of the dresses every 20-30 years, and I put labels on top of their heads and displayed it from oldest to most recent to show the growth, and to mimic the picture timeline references I used.

The first part that I did in this project was the research, which took about 30 minutes. In my research, I gathered and chose the dresses that I wanted to display not only based on how they look but also on their culture significance at the time. Fashion says a lot about a time period, and I felt as if it was important to accurately display the progression of the Victorian era fashion and show the differences between one and other. The second part was sketching, which took a lot longer. The sketch itself took about 2 hours since I was trying to figure out how I should make them interact with one another. Should they be gather around sitting at a dinner? Should they be on the streets away from another whilst displaying the scenery at the time? Should it look like a painting? In the end, I chose to go with using mannequins, since this is supposed to be a museum exhibit, not just a painting. The painting, standing, and background took about 1 hour or so, due to the amount of details in the dresses. I wanted the colours to stand out from each other so I chose different (but accurate to its time) colours. The signs and writing took only 15 minutes, since I already prepared a google document with the information I was going to write in. The tricky part was just trying to figure out how to display it. In total, I spent about maybe 4-5 hours on this project.

Although I am very proud of the shading and the way the dresses ended up looking, I feel as if the anatomy could’ve been better, but that has to do more with my art skill level than the project itself. However, I am still learning to improve with digital art and I like to believe that this project was a good opportunity to improve more. For the writing on the right, I felt like the perspective was off. Since the background was tilted, the words should’ve been too but I ultimately wasn’t sure how to change that, so in the future it’ll be a good idea to get more familiar with my programs and learn how to plan out where the words will go before doing the drawing. Overall, I think this project challenged me creatively in a new way, and I had fun drawing and researching about the Victorian era!