Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Circa 1990. Somehow, I stumble upon Elsa Klensch on CNN and get a subscription to Vogue. Read Elsa’s obituary here on CNN. Haute couture becomes an obsession of mine.

Why? I have no clue. I saw beauty, and creativity, and France. I was in my early stages of learning French, thinking French would be something my mom and I shared. That’s another story.

I wove vampires and fashion into my creative endeavors, and after college, Darrell Parry encouraged me to learn more about haute couture and fashion illustration by buying me hard-to-find books on the topic…

Today, I share some of my favorites from my sketchbook.

First Sketch:

For a while, I worked on an erotic prequel to the series (I used some of those chapters in Absolution). The book ended with Étienne d’Amille’s wedding with Basilie Saint-Ebène. To write about that, I drew the whole wedding party, including Étienne and all Basilie’s sisters as bridesmaids. Yes, Jacqueline was the flower girl. I needed to know what the dress he made for her would look like. You know, to write about it.

Second Sketch:

In most of my first published novel, Manipulations, the staff at Chez d’Amille cannot come up with a name for the upcoming spring collection, which includes primarily dresses — casual dresses in shades of cream and fancier ones in white silk. Adelaide wears a dupioni silk dress at the party at the end of the book.

Third sketch(es):

As the French military enters the story late in book two, Courting Apparitions, and the military operations in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa become pivotal to the plot in the third book, Recovery, we see more personnel in military uniform. In the end of Absolution, after a military rescue, Étienne transforms the experience into inspiration for a future collection, Chicks with Swords, modeled after the uniforms of Dr. Jacqueline Saint-Ebène’s branch, the French Army Health Services (Service de Santé d’Armée) and the French Republican Guard.

Speaking of the Guard… here was my original depiction of a Guard… in Sharpie and charcoal. Why are the swords in charcoal? Not sure.

Fourth sketch: