Stephen Sprouse Quotes

All my work begins with drawings.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

I work on fittings, mostly. You know, I sketch less and less in my work. I sketch for the show sometimes, but then it becomes more conceptual. But when I don't sketch, it becomes more pragmatic.

It's a real luxury to have a studio all to myself, somewhere to start mood boards for the next collection.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it, and I put pictures in it.

I try to look at design from a more conceptual standpoint.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

Personally, I have had sometimes moments where I thought my idea behind the idea of a collection - the concept maybe - something that we don't see at the end on the catwalk, I think the way it was, the genesis in my mind, was probably artistic, an artistic approach.

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

I'm not a designer, I'm a creator.

I carry a notebook full of sketches of pictures I want to take - they are really scruffy sketches, but at least I am going out there with a clear objective.

I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the pictures.

A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.

Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.

My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.

A design that I create is like my own extension. It's 'thinking made visible.'

In the same way I accumulate objects, I also accumulate images, and I find them arranging themselves into categories, too. And some images insist on being painted; others don't.