A Family Circle Cover Recreation

Last year, when I found this Family Circle cover from 1958, I knew I wanted to recreate it. It just felt really me. Not just the hats, but the cheerful feeling of it too, drew me in. I ran out of time last year, but this year I got it done!

I wish I had more hats to choose from to match the originals more closely but you work with what you have.

There have been so many great covers created already this month and shared on Instagram. Everyone is doing amazing work and it's so much fun! I look forward to seeing more.

"My Vintage Cover" is back!

I hope you're in the mood for some vintage image recreations, because "My Vintage Cover" is coming back this August!

Like last year, Nicole of The Artyologist and I are hosting this community challenge and inviting you all to join us in recreating iconic vintage fashion images.

If you want to join in, here's what you need to know:

• The challenge runs from August 1-31 and you can share your images at any time during the month
• This is a non-competitive community event, just join in and have fun!
• Take part on Instagram or on your own blog (if you have one). If you post on Instagram, use the hashtag #myvintagecover, and feel free to tag Nicole @theartyologist or me @tanithrowan as well. If you post on your blog, let us know so we don't miss it and can include you in a round-up post at the end.
• Although it is called "My Vintage Cover", feel free to choose any vintage fashion image to recreate.
• When you share your image, share the inspiration image too (or link to it) so that we can see the original too.
• Don't be daunted by feeling that you have to do a detailed and faithful recreation, you can be as accurate as you want or just recreate some elements of the image.
• Create as many images as you want to!
• Feel free to repost the above image to share the news of the challenge around.

Here's a quick recap of my images from last year so get you a bit inspired, and you can see more in Nicole's round-up from last year.

I hope you'll join us - and if not, I hope you'll enjoy watching along!

My Vintage Cover: The Red Gloves Edition

Another vintage cover! I'm really pleased with myself for doing three this month. although there was still one more that I really wanted to attempt. Oh well, next time!

This was one I spotted in a book I borrowed this month from the library (you would have seen about it in the newsletter if you are a subscriber), called "Cover up: the art of magazine covers in Australia" by Robert Holden. It has lots of great Australian covers that I hadn't seen before, and this one really caught my eye.

The editing on this one was actually much easier than the others. Most of it was playing with the details of the black and white filter and removing the effect on the gloves and lips. I'm not much of a make-up person, but I wanted to get that drawn outline look on the lips so I actually used eyeliner. Which made me look crazy, and it didn't even show up in the end! Luckily only the baby saw me like that, and it was his fault for waking up, really.

If you missed my other covers, there was the yellow polka-dots and the red beret, and also make sure you keep checking the #myvintagecover hashtag on Instagram - there have been some amazing efforts!

Thank you everyone who has joined in or supported those who have with your encouraging comments.

My Vintage Cover: The Red Beret Edition

The problem with researching places to find vintage magazine cover images was that I found so many that I want to recreate! Some require a lot of effort, clothes or accessories I don't have, or special locations, and they can wait for the future. (I'm not sure yet if we'll run the challenge again, but I know I'll be doing more covers either way!)

Some, however, were within my current reach, like this one. Despite what I said after my first vintage cover recreation, I'm back with another close up! 

  

Since I have a red beret (which I love and wear often), I couldn't resist this one.

Some people have asked about my photo editing. I did this one entirely with Picmonkey. If you are interested, here are a few details, otherwise skip to the end! 

For this image I had to play around with editing out the rest of my body and whitening up the background: mostly using the "clone" and "curves" tools, but the fun stuff was getting the magazine-y feel.

Obviously the text adds to that, but so does the "film grain" filter. To get the paint effect in the background, I added a painted texture and then removed it from the face and hat (as well as fading it a lot to keep it more subtle). All the effects in picmonkey can be applied to just a part of the image if you like. And then I added the coloured bits in the background. I used the ombre filter but the draw tool would probably be just as good.

Plus there was a bit of *ahem* wrinkle removal, eye shadow, lip tint, and using "clone" to remove a cat hair from the hat!

Unfortunately a lot of these are tools you only get if you pay to use Picmonkey, but I'm sure similar features are available with other software. I also use Gimp, which is free, and has a lot of great features, but it isn't quite as simple to use. In most of my regular photo editing I only use the free tools like exposure, cropping, resizing and so on.

I had fun with this one, but more importantly, I think I could get used to wearing my berets low down like this! What do you think?

My Vintage Cover: The Polka Dot Edition

August is here, which means it's time for the My Vintage Cover challenge to begin. I thought I'd try to get one done early to get the ball rolling, and I hope to find time for one more before the month is out.

This has been quite the learning experience for me, especially since I usually avoid taking photos of my hats on myself! But here it is:

Based on this Australian Women's Weekly cover:

Lessons I learned:

Play to your strengths. Actually I thought I was doing this, by choosing a cover that was just showing a hat, but I didn't consider that a facial close-up really would be best if you have make-up skills, and also don't mind directly comparing your profile to that of a model.

The same pose will look different on you than the original model. I tried to achieve the same pose, but not only was it really hard, but it wasn't exactly flattering. I would have been better finding the best angle for me that was similar to the original.

Make something useful. I really don't know why I chose a hat in yellow polka dots instead of something I (or anyone else) might actually ever wear. Oh well!

Photo editing is the best thing ever. I HATED my photos when I took them, but the baby woke up so I worked with what I had. Editing makes soooo much difference. I really like the end result!

If I attempt another cover, I will choose one that is shot from further away, and go for a generally similar look without worrying too much about high levels of accuracy. And there will probably be no polka dots.

Where to find vintage magazine covers

Next week sees the start of August and the My Vintage Cover photo challenge! If you missed the details about the challenge, you can read it all in my last post.

Today I wanted to talk about ways of finding your inspiration image, and share some useful resources.

Books:

Sometimes it's nice to just look at pictures the old-fashioned way: in a book. I'm not going to suggest you buy a book just to find an image for this challenge, but if you have a good local library, you might get lucky and find some good resources there. Fashion books with lots of images that I've borrowed from my library include: "The Australian Women's Weekly fashion : the first 50 years", "Vogue Fashion", and "The Chronology of Fashion". Nicole recommends "Vogue: The Covers", which looks awesome. Checking my library again I've just found "Cover up : the art of magazine covers in Australia"and "Front page : covers of the twentieth-century" - I'll let you know how they are!

Online resources:

You can actually do pretty well just from using a search engine and typing in "vintage magazine cover", but for something a little more curated, it's hard to beat Pinterest. The good thing about both of these options is that you will find results from the big names, like Vogue and Life and so on, but also ones you may never have heard of or wouldn't think to search for. Some of the lesser known titles I'm enjoying are The Queenslander, Woman and Home, and The Farmer's Wife. You can then always pick a publication and narrow your search down.

One of my favourite things to do with Pinterest, especially when the results aren't what I'm looking for (like when no one knows what a pillbox hat looks like, for example), is to search "Boards" instead of "Pins", to see who else has curated the mess for you.

I've created my own Pinterest board for magazine covers. It was going to be just ones that might be suitable to recreate but I'm afraid I couldn't stick to that. Maybe you have a zebra to ride, though?

And here are some of the best boards I found for a few delightful publications: Vogue, Life, Harper's Bazaar (this has editorials too, but is actually from Harper's Bazaar's account), and Cosmopolitan.

You can browse the covers of the Australian Women's Weekly online thanks to the National Library of Australia. Chatelaine magazine has a nice gallery of their covers through the years. You can find covers of The Queenslander on Flickr Commons, thanks to the State Library of Queensland.

I think, in fact, the hardest part is not finding the covers online, but narrowing your search and finding something that will suit you to recreate. If you have a decade in mind, that would be a good way to narrow your search. I also found some of the smaller publications by searching this way.

I also recommend seeing what your library gives you access to online (after not being a library member for many years I'm now addicted!), because I can access the Vogue archives through the State Library of NSW with my local library card number, as well as a number of other resources.

Edited to add: A couple of people on Instagram suggested also checking Ebay for vintage magazines. Even if you don't want to buy, there are some great cover images to look at there.

I hope this helps with some inspiration if you are thinking of joining in the challenge, and even if you aren't! I could look at vintage covers all day.

Nicole has recently done a round up of her previous recreations, so make sure you check out that post too.

"My Vintage Cover" - a Photo Recreation Challenge

I'm back! As promised, I am now a mother of two. It's quite exhausting. The business is still on maternity leave, but the blog is returning a little earlier for a fun community event.

If you follow Nicole and her blog The Artyologist, you would have seen her lovely recreations of vintage Vogue magazine covers. I have long had my eye on a few covers that I want to recreate, and this led me to think that we could all have some fun with these images! I contacted Nicole and the My Vintage Cover challenge is the result. So join us in August to create and share your own version of a favourite vintage fashion image!

Here are the challenge guidelines:

• The challenge runs from August 1- 31, 2017 and you are welcome to post your images on any day of the month. We are announcing the challenge now, so you can start choosing which images to recreate, and preparing any pieces you might need to have in order to complete your recreation.
• This is a non-competitive community event. We just want people to have fun, both in the challenge of recreating vintage images, and in sharing the finished images with others.
• The event will take place in a two places. If you have an Instagram account, you can take part there, but if you don't have Instagram, you can participate on your blog. Use whichever platform you prefer.
• If you post your recreations on Instagram, use the hashtag, #myvintagecover which we have created for this event, so we can all see your images.
• If you are posting on your blog, feel free to let either Nicole or I know about it, so we can see your post and share it with others when we do a round up post.
• We will be posting a few "round-up" posts on our Instagram accounts or blogs depending on how many participants we have.
• Though we are calling it "My Vintage Cover," you are welcome to recreate either a vintage magazine cover (such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar or McCall's) or an editorial vintage fashion image. Images with distinctive poses, or styles that are iconic to a specific era are great options.
• Repost and share your inspiration image, or link to it, so we can all compare the recreations to the original images.
• Feel free to make your recreation as detailed as you would like. Even if you don't have it 100% accurate, join in anyways with what you can. There are a lot of great vintage images out there which rely on iconic makeup and hair, distinctive poses, or unique camera angles, so even if you don't have all the details correct, you can still participate.
• You are not limited to just one image. Recreate as many images as you would like to! (and have the time for!)
• Please feel free to repost this image any and everywhere you can. The more people who know about the challenge, the better!
• Most important of all: have fun! We are so excited to see what you come up with.

The Australian Women's Weekly, 9 Dec 1953

Now, who has four white kittens I can hug?