When Claire Ward attended the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, she majored in fashion design. But during her time at the U, her studies in the field soon revealed a different career path.
“Even though I was studying how to make clothing, drawing and art were always passions, and I really enjoyed the sketching stage of fashion design,” Ward notes. “I loved doing the really stylized fashion figures and sketching clothes more than I liked actually making them.”
That said, she fell into her career as a live-event fashion sketch artist almost by accident. A few years ago, a friend of Ward’s was producing a fashion show, and the friend asked if she would be interested in doing fast fashion-style portraits of the attendees at the show.
“I said, ‘Oh, sure, that sounds fun,’” Ward recalls. “I am a quick sketcher and relatively good at it. I did that and then it snowballed from there. It was a hit, and people asked me to do other events after that first fashion show. Once I kept doing more events, more people asked me to do other ones. And then that turned into commission work as well. It grew organically.”
But why the focus on sketching attendees’ clothing? “At corporate events, people often look their best, and it’s a fun way to capture someone’s essence in an artistic way,” Ward explains. “I think what people really love about it is I’m not doing their faces. No hate to caricature artists, but I’m not doing caricatures. I’m not making people look goofy or highlighting their flaws. I’m mostly focusing on people’s outfits, and I’m just getting an idea of them down.”
Ward has worked for many corporate clients, including Louis Vuitton, Tiffany and Co., Target Corp., The Hutton House, Twin Cities Orthopedics, Delta Faucet, The Hewing Hotel, and the Galleria Edina. She works primarily in the Twin Cities, but she can sketch at events elsewhere if her expenses and travel time are covered. She says it takes her about five minutes do a full-color, full-body sketch of one person.
Ward describes her work as “whimsical portraits.” She adds, “This whimsical style works for a lot of different kinds of events, and I think people really like to see themselves in art form. It’s something magical to people.”
