PAPER, PENCIL AND PURE INSTINCT: HELEN MCCLAFFERTY ON KEEPING FASHION ILLUSTRATION HUMAN
In a digital moment where feeds are flooded with slick, hyper-polished AI imagery, artist Helen McClafferty is choosing to walk—deliberately, proudly—in the opposite direction. Her latest submission to the FIDA Awards is a celebration of the handmade, the imperfect, the tactile and the instinctive. It’s a declaration, softly spoken but firmly held: fashion illustration is at its most powerful when you can feel the hand that made it.
For Helen, FIDA isn’t just a competition; it’s a community. “I love entering FIDA for the opportunity to connect with other artists and to see how my work fits within the fashion illustration world,” she says. “I always come away feeling very inspired, connected and motivated, which is why I entered this round.” Her voice carries the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely relishes the exchange—the cross-pollination of ideas, the shared understanding of what it means to draw fashion with emotion, not algorithms.
This round, she arrived with a thoughtful selection: a handful of images and one animation, all crafted entirely by hand. Pencil. Paint. Movement built frame by frame. No digital edits, no safety net, and absolutely no AI. “It was intentional,” she explains. “I’ve been seeing too much AI on my feed in the last year. In the past I have used digital techniques to enhance or add to my illustrations, sometimes out of fear of making mistakes, but this time they were all hand crafted.” There’s something refreshing—even rebellious—about that choice. In a landscape of perfect gradients and computer-generated symmetry, Helen’s work bears the marks of human touch: imperfections, hesitations, gestures, the texture of real life.
Her animation, in particular, embodies this ethos. A stop motion piece made from hand-drawn illustrations with movable elements, it’s charmingly raw. “I consciously left [the pieces] looking like cut-out paper,” she says. “I think the way it is a bit wonky and rudimentary makes it stand out against the polished perfection we are seeing too much of.” The result feels alive, like a fashion sketchbook coming off the page and performing under a spotlight—rough edges and all.
Helen’s approach taps into something many fashion creatives are craving: authenticity. Not the curated, brand-approved kind, but the type that comes from hands stained with graphite, from pages filled with experiments, from quiet hours spent redrawing a detail until it feels right. Her work asks us to slow down, to look closer, to value the process as much as the outcome.
In an era obsessed with speed and automation, Helen McClafferty is making a case for craft—real craft. Her FIDA submission is more than a portfolio; it’s a reminder that fashion illustration is a living, breathing art form, and its future doesn’t have to look machine-made. Sometimes the wonky, wobbly, beautifully human version is the one that stands out most.
https://www.instagram.com/hvm_illustration/
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