Hi everyone! Today I'm going to talk about mood boards for inspiration for designs or anything in general! To be completely honest, I haven't done mood boards since my pre-college classes at FIT years ago. But recently, I've become obsessed with making them - it's so much fun when you really get into it.
I have two methods of making these mood boards: one is by doing it by hand and the other is through the app Procreate ( this is also the app that I use to do my digitally drawn designs on my iPad ). Doing it on the app is very mess free and easy to do! However, I like the hands on feel of cutting out images from magazines and gluing them.
What I do first is flip through the magazines either hard cover or digitally, and bookmark or screenshot outfits along similar trends. After this I cut them out and piece them together in somewhat of a collage to make the mood board! You can also decorate them any way you want to add some nice touches. I used sparkly tape from Michael's which you can find with this link.
Here are some that I have made recently:
From W Magazine's Volume One 2020 ( by hand ):
I love the inspiration that I got from making this mood board. As I flipped through the pages from W, I saw a trend and began to cut out these outfits. The vibe here is a suit style with designs such as plaid and houndstooth. I also liked the added inspiration from the grungy boots and colors such as grey and black.
After laying out all the cut out images, I organized them in a collage format for whatever I thought looked best. Here's a time when you can be as creative as you want to be. With this, I designed this outfit seen below. I decided to add a little pop of color with the pink, similar to the Chanel jump suit with red on the top right of the mood board.
From Vogue's 2020 September Edition ( digitally ):
On this second mood board I pieced together some styles on the darker side, with leather, and big sleeves! This was the first mood board that I made on my iPad, and it was surprisingly very easy. Especially when I wanted to move things around after changing my mind, and didn't have to worry about the glue.
It also made it easy to add some things in such as the black sparkle accents. I absolutely loved the vibe of the big pants from the black & white picture ( middle right ), and made this design on the iPad seen below!
I forgot to incorporate a stylish mask, but that can be seen in the next design!
Also From Vogue's 2020 September Edition ( digitally ):
I especially enjoyed making this mood board after seeing ROSALÍA! I love her at the moment and what she is doing with her music ( just a side note ). I like the colors from all of these outfits which made them stand out to me. What I love about mood boarding is being able to layer different decorations like I did here with the silver sparkle. It's easy to do with the Procreate app and adds a nice touch!
Another cool feature is that when you insert an image you can crop it by just erasing it like any other ink, which is what I did with the bottom two pictures. For this mood board I also liked how magazines are now including models with face masks! It inspired me to design this:
I decided to do a rough shadow at the bottom of this design to add some dimension, let me know if this is a good addition or if a white background is better!
Overall, I think mood boarding is a great way to get some inspiration when you seem to have hit a dead end with design ideas. It's also great to keep up with new trends and fun to flip through magazines.
Hope you got somewhat inspired! Keep posted for more posts to come or let me know if there are any topics I should cover in this blog!
~ Isabel
Beautiful!
Amazing work!