Basics of Fashion Sketches or Fashion Illustration

Inspired by the world of fashion! In today's fashion, companies are looking for creative people who can communicate their fashion ideas into sketches and designs, clearly and efficiently.

In simple term, Sketching expresses your design ideas onto paper (or computer). Ideas right from your imaginative mind into visual illustration that you can showcase or share with people. To develop your fashion design drawing skills in the early stages, figure templates and simple methods of developing figure poses will help you express your ideas.

Next by adding sketches of fabrics, adding colours and accessories to your figure template, will enhance the eventual sketch. The ultimate goal of your sketch is to provide you and the people you want to share, the feel of how the garment will look like when worn. This gives the visual impact!

There are two main methods to sketch fashion illustration, either through paper sketching or through the use of computer software (Adobe Illustrator ®). For a start, we will focus on using the traditional method, i.e., using paper to do fashion design sketches.

Tips on how to draw :

1)      Figure Drawing (Choice 1)or Use a Figure Template(Choice 2)

You can start by doing free hand drawing or using traced figure template. The former, (choice 1) you have to study the anatomy of a human body – e.g men, women, children. That is the human figure portions, e.g the head, neck ,shoulders and chest, the lower back, the legs etc. (see Attached figure). For fashion drawing the portions are usually exaggerated to express a strong image on the legs or the body.

The latter (Choice 2), you can just simply traced from an existing figure template or from a photograph of a fashion model taken from a page in a magazine.  

2)      In fashion sketches, it is also essential to know how to draw fabric, and more importantly know how to draw the folds of clothing. The lighting effect, shading depth will enhance the quality of the sketch and gives a 3 dimensional illustrations.

3)      The use of colours and the different techniques in reflecting the movements and the poses of the model. 

4)      In clothing sketch, do include a back view with your sketch.