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Something that is very important as well in fashion design is coloring your fashion sketches. After you’ve inked in the whole situation, you can take color pencils, pastels, wash, watercolor, whatever you want. I’m going to do this one with some pastels, because they’re really nice to shade. So you just start out on the outside, you pick your color blocking, which this dress has a lot of color blocking in it. With pastels less is more because they spread around the page really well. And this might or might not be the final color that I decide to do this dress in, but it’s mainly used to create color blocking, so that you could see what the final design is going to be.

I’m going to go heavy on the shoulders to show shadow, in here and here, and here I’m going to hit this with some more red. I want to go with a paler shade of red here. It’s a very volcanic dress so far. And we’re going to go with, you know, we’re going to go with red sleeves since they’re in line, should be nice, actually is more of a burgundy or a wine color, excellent. So now you take your handy dandy smudging device, and work the color in. And by creating those lines on the outside, you automatically create shading, because now you’re just drawing the color into the panels or design lines of the dress. One thing to keep in mind with pastels is after you get done finished working with one color, if it’s not in the same family, you have to use a different side of your smudge stick, otherwise you’re going to turn your whole dress the same color, which you don’t want.

Then you’ll have to redraw the whole thing, and that’s a pain. So I have these oranges in here, I’m using just the side of my smudge stick. Make sure you blow on it every once in a while, because that pastel is just basically powder compressed into a stick. And I think I want to darken these a bit, because these are going to be a different color. It really, I just love pastels, it’s because it’s instant gratification, it’s like, damn, it’s colored. And if the pastel happens to go outside the line, it’s no big deal, you can just take an eraser to it later. I’ll go in and do the skin toning later, but that is one way using pastels to color in a fashion sketch.

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This is how you indicate a zipper. I’m going to go ahead and sketch a cat suit, which I’ve already done. Pretty much the last detail is the zipper and it’s going to be a featured zipper. It’s going to be down the front of the cat suit, so I’m going to give her, her neckline right there.

And you basically just like find the center of the body because this zipper’s going to be going down the center of the body and you make your guideline, dotted lines. You figure out how long you want that zipper to be, and then you make your little long rectangular kind of shape, indicate the zipper right there, and you can do little X’s down it, and that just shows the zipper teeth. You can do zigzags, you can do anything.

Even in technical sketching, the zipper is just represented with a line like this. You could even do this, you know what I mean? And then your pull can just be a circle, which I’m going to do here. Give it a good 60’s, futuristic 60’s element. So that’s how you draw a zipper.

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Something that’s really important when doing fashion illustration are front and back croquis. You need a front view, you need a back view.

So basically, you have your front view here, where you can render all of your details, run your clothes over it, the whole nine yards. Your back view, you want them to be kind of turned about three=quarter of the way. It allows you to just show all of the details on the back of the dress, gown, pants, whatever the heck you’re doing, and also allows you to do like a train, what have you.

It’s nice to do it with a three-quarter turn if you’re going to do a back croquis as well as a front croquis. And that’s basically why you do need front and back croquis, when doing fashion alterations.

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This is how you indicate color, texture and pattern. I prefer to use colored pencils, they’re great because you can get all sorts of harder lines and what not, and then you can smudge it all over the place to give yourself more depth and shadow.

So I’m going to go with these three colors, different shades of blue for this dress, and just start of really, really light. I’m going to connect my colors across giving a beautiful butterfly inspired design. And I’m going to go in with another color.

And this particular dress is going to be made out of a very smooth mesh, so the texture itself that I’m trying to accomplish here is something that is just smooth, and just not too textured. So that’s a challenge in itself but it seems like it’s working out for me.

After you’ve done all of your light shading, I think I’m going to leave some panels of white in there, which will look cool. Now you go back in and you do harder lines wherever you think there should be a shadow. And usually if you’re doing a dead on sketch, somebody that is facing dead on to you, all the shadows are going to be on the sides of their body, et cetera, et cetera.

You can create a source of light if you want, but pretty much it’s like looking in the mirror, and take a look at yourself and where the shadows fall on your body. Don’t worry about these hard lines that you’re making because you go in later with your smudge stick, which is a wonderful thing, everyone should have a smudge stick, and blend all of this together. And you want to kind of like, anything that’s falling to the back of your design, you want to give it a little bit more color, because that’s just saying it’s in the back and it’s shadowing it more. So I think I’m going to keep that white in there.

So now I’m going to go in with my smudge stick handy dandy, and now you want to blend. You don’t want to mix your colors, so if you get too much of a blue in one corner of your smudge stick, you can chop it off, you can do all kinds of things. But I’m just going to rotate it and do it with a purple with that, which I got to do a little bit more purple shading here. I’m losing my shading.

And now as the final step, just to indicate that this is mesh, I’m going to go over certain sections of the garment and just kind of create a meshy pattern. You don’t have to cover the entire thing, it’s just to get a notion of what is the fabric choice. I’m doing it on the white sections because it will show up the best.

And that’s how you indicate color, shadow and texture.

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Sometimes something you’ll have to do a lot as a fashion is to retrace your sketches, so you can add a different texture or color to it without having to redo the entire sketch from scratch. And I like to use marker paper, because then that can be your final sketch. It’s kind of see through but it’s not too flimsy as tracing paper would be.

So first step is, of course, put the paper over your sketch. And this dress was a lace dress, but I need to re-render it without the lace. Using my maker paper because it’s great, see-through, and sturdy, all at the same time. Give her both necklines, give her sleeves, do your hemline, create your folds, but you’re basically tracing right through it, it’s wonderful. Give her a head, guess she deserves a head. I’m going to give her a high hairdo, why not. Get some legs, give her some heels, because it’s a different dress. And now, you’ve just retraced your fashion sketch, and now you can create this in any color, and it’s really handy that way. So that’s how you retrace a fashion sketch.

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This is how you draw a wedding dress. When you’re rendering a wedding dress, I usually have the potential bride sitting right beside me. So, I have to be really quick. Fluid. The whole nine yards.

You kind of want to go big with this. Because, who doesn’t want something fancy and glamorous to get married in?

So, we start with our silhouette. And, I’m going to go with a mermaid silhouette and have it swing to the back. I’m really big on that. Have her have a nipped-in waist.

This is for a skinny bride. She needs to eat something. But, whatever. Let that happen at the wedding.

I think I want to do strapless. That would be nice. I’m going to go with a nice V-neckline, which I call the Dragonfly neckline, which is one of my signatures.

You want to indicate beading. And, indicating beading can be as simple as little dots. You want to indicate seam lines as well. And, I’m all about long seam lines which hug the body and create beautiful lines in the gown and follow.

You want to carry all of your draping lines up. Everywhere where you do a squiggle, you go up.

You definitely, if you’re drawing for a bride, you definitely want give her a head. A lot of times you can leave the head off but, you want to give her a head.

And you want to ask her, “What kind of hair do you want to wear for the ceremony? Are you wearing it up? Are you wearing it down? What have you.” She’s going to wear her hair up.

And you’re like, “What are you going to wear? Are you going to wear a veil? Are you going to wear this or that?” We’ll give her a veil, which is easy. You just kind of just carry long lines down. She’s going to wear a very dramatic veil.

You’ll then want to harden your lines a bit and go in with ink. And, just kind of just make everything apparent that is going to be the final design. Because, you got to get your point across at your meeting with your bride.

I’m not going to go nuts with the pen because I plan on making a white gown and I don’t want, I only want an indication of the seam lines.

And, see, just use your pencil lines as a reference. Because, you’re going to go in with your eraser and erase them anyway afterwards.

And, she’s going to have opera length gloves. Why not? You want to give her some cleavage, because she is wearing a corset gown. That’s the plan, at least.

Go really light with your pen. It’s really great to have like a fine point pen for this sort of detail. Give her her face.

Oh, let me get the bead work dotted on there. And she’s going to have some bead work on her little dragonfly lapels, I’ll call them.

You want to, don’t forget, before you erase your pencil you want to, like, add in your bead work, if you’re even going to bother. Or if she wants it, or what have you. And I’m doing it down the front and on the lapels.

Now, you just go in with your eraser and get rid of all the pencil. All right.

So, the tricky thing about white with wedding gowns is you have to think about shading. And I use a very pale grey to create that. Pale warm grey.

And, this is probably the only time I use markers. They’re not my favorite thing in the world to use. Because, it just takes a little bit of mastering to just get these lines right.

And, I know it looks brown. But, it’s just to indicate. You’re going to go in with some white later.

Once you’ve done that, you have your blender, which is basically just a clear marker to kind of just, like, bring that color in. And shade it in.
And, it may look like it’s turning the whole thing grey, but that will fade.

Then you take your China marker, which is a great thing for creating details on black or white. To just to kind of just make certain things pop. And, just kind of just fill in the whole thing. It just will make it lighten up. It will blend everything together.

And there you have it. That’s how you draw a wedding gown.

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Okay, so this is how to draw seam lines. I’m going to go ahead and draw over one of my existing sketches, and I’ll show you the finished product of the sketch when I’m done.

So first you want to draw your silhouette, of course. And really practice with seam lines, it’s just kind of just letting your hand flow. It’s not rocket science, it’s just like being controlled, and not being too nervous or uptight. You’re the commander of your pencil. Draw the silhouette of the outside, I’ll give her a hand, why not. I hate drawing hands, I didn’t say that. All right, now ready for seam lines. So start with your neckline, and then, this is a very complicated dress, as I love to make things overly complicated or overly simple. Just start with like a nice, long line. With this dress, every seam converges at the waist point, which is not easy to do, trust me. When we made this thing, it was tough, but I love a challenge. Just be strong with your pencil, don’t be afraid, you’re the commander, and there we go. Little shoulder seams, of course have to carry every one of these into the arm, which made it even harder to make, but whatever, I like things complicated. It’s all about stretching your, showing your muscles as a designer, being able to make anything possible.

All right, and there we go, that’s how you draw seam lines.

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This is how you draw a draping. I chose a dress which is very, very complicated and very, very draped to dive in full steam with.

First, you want to get your outer silhouette dealt with. Think about what your shape is going to be. Always when you’re doing something draped you have almost like bubbles and squiggles at the outer silhouette of the garment which you can establish before you even make your lines. Then you carry your lines down, carry your lines down. You kind of want to be fluid, because draping is fluid.

Then, this dress that I’m drawing here in particular drapes from the hip, a corseted wrap dress. I just carry my lines directionally, because you want to do it in the direction in which you want the draping to happen. On this particular dress the draping comes from both directions. It’s coming from underneath and it’s coming from the overlay of it which is the upper layer.

First, let me finish out this upper layer. See what I mean? When you have draping happening you’re going to have a squiggly line on the outside of your garment where the draping ends. Every time that you have a little squiggle you want to just carry that up, carry that up. It’s kind of the same thing as pleats or folds.

I’m just going to finish up by creating the bottom of my gown. It’s the same thing. Follow up, follow up, diagonally, just be fluid with your lines. Whatever, worry about the shoes later. We’re only worrying about draping right now. Those aren’t the best shoes I’ve ever drawn, but what are you going to do.

Alright. That’s pretty much it. That’s how you draw draping. This particular gown I’ve already created. This would be a photo of the finished product.

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Now we’re going to draw a woman’s jacket. First thing you want to do is you want to think about what shape you’re going for. This season peplum jackets are really in, and so let’s do a peplum jacket, with lapels. All right, here we go.

You want to think about what your lapel is going to do first, because that anchors the entire jacket. I’m going to go with a really deep lapel. You bring it up off the shoulder, like this, this is the shoulder line right here. When drawing jackets you kind of want to exaggerate the shoulders a bit, it just kind of adds to the whole structural feel of the garment. And then, here we go, we draw the outer line of our collar, which I’m doing, just like kind of a 20’s style shawl situation. Jackets always have a closure in the front, so you want to think about what kind of closure you want to do.

I’m going to do buttons, so I’ll do three buttons. It’s always great to do things in odd numbers when you’re doing design details, it’s just prettier to the eyes. And now I’m going to go with a pleated peplum on the jacket. I just messed up that side, but that’s why we do it in pencil first. See now I’m creating those lines, and now I’m going to take them up, because they’re nice hard pleats coming off the jacket. We want to render our sleeves, and when you get to the corners of your sleeves, you always want to indicate a fold there. It just shows that there’s a fold in the fabric, and it’s just simply just a squiggle of a line. And as you’re indicating your sleeves, you want to think about the fit of the sleeve, and I’m going to go with like a little bit of a boxy fit to the sleeve. You do your little squiggles in the corners of the elbows, just to show the fabric folding, and I’m going to do this jacket with some sort of trousers, kind of masculine, strong.

These trousers’ not the best one, but it’s all about the jacket. I’m going to add some seam lines in here, and you also want to think about the back, what’s it doing in the back. And now you want to think about what sort of cuff you want to do, and I think this jacket would look really nice with a simple cuff, because there’s a lot going on already. Don’t get too nuts with the details. Three buttons with the cuff, and I’ll fix those pants later. After this you should ink in your drawing, color it and shade it, and that’s how you draw a jacket.

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Getting into the fashion business, pretty much just dive in. One of the
most important things to do first is to learn how to sew. If you don’t
know how to sew you don’t know what goes into making and designing a
garment and you can save yourself a lot of trouble. Just start sketching,
just start exploring like inspiration, see what inspires you, hone in on
what part of the business you want to be a part of. Find your specialty;
find what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what brings you joy. You
don’t want to make it feel like work, you want to make it feel like joy and
I’m lucky enough to have that. I’ve carved out my niche and I get to do
all kinds of things.

From couture to bridal to costuming to everything
and basically it’s just setting your eye on the prize and going for it and
that’s pretty much all the tricks to the trade. You really have to just
believe in yourself, never ever let anybody knock you down, if you get
knocked down stand right back up because if you don’t, somebody’s going to
jump right up in front of you. That’s just a little tidbit about getting
into the fashion industry.

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Next we’re going to shade and texture our fashion illustration. So here is my illustration, I am going to start out on all of my folds, and on the outline. You can be a little heavy-handed with this, because you’re going to end up smudging this with your smudge stick later, which everybody have. And anything that’s kind of in the background, you kind of want to put some shadow on.

And after this point, you want to just kind of smooth over the entire garment, go little heavy over here at that waist, you always want to shade the waist nicely, every girl wants a nice smaller waist, and then you want to just keep going, and just kind of just keep smoothing out. Don’t worry if your lines are looking a little raggedy because you’re going to smooth all that out with your smudge stick. Just kind of have fun with it, just let your hand go. Don’t forget to reinterpret. I’m basically sketching a crepe back satin, which is just kind of like a flowy satin, so I can just do a very smooth texture on this. Now I simply just take my smudge stick, give it lots of pressure, and you just keep going and going, until you feel like you created a smooth effect.

Then your final step is don’t be afraid, because you got to create this texture to kind of go in with your pen, and just darkened just a few areas, work in your hemline, and your silhouette, because that’s very important. And if you lose a little bit, if you go a little bit outside your line, if you’re lucky, you work from the outside to the inside to get rid of that overshadow. And that’s basically how you create shadow and texture on fabric.

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Whenever you’re doing any kind of fashion illustration, you should definitely think about shoes. In every croquis that I do, I create the foot already in the shoe position. And I love a platform. It never really goes out of style. Women love to be tall. So I build in a platform, the front of the shoe you figure out later. But you always want to give a side view of the foot. This particular shoe I’m going to do a very severe wedge on. Why not? The great thing about drawing shoes is you can really let your mind go and just have lots of fun with it. You always want to think about where it’s going to connect to the back of the foot. And then once you have your side view completed, you then can do your front view. And you just want to look at your side view first and then just create that line. And think about whether you want it to be a pointy shoe, a square toe shoe, et cetera, et cetera. And that is a quick and easy way to draw shoes.

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Once you’ve gotten your base color on there, it’s really important to go in and shade and color your fashion illustration. So what I then do is I take a color pencil, just really work the color into the corner and design lines of the garment. You want to think also about where the light is hitting this garment, so you always want to darken around the edges.

You want to kind of carry it up the seam lines a bit to create some saturation. It’s another great way if your dress happens to be drapey to show drape, texture, what have you. So I’m going to go in here, really shade in on her waist. You’re basically just really driving it home, making it sure that your point is getting across to your viewer. All right, and then I take my handy smudge stick and I just blend, and I could do this for days, you know, one of those things. And that is pretty much how you shade in color, your fashion illustration.

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So now I’m going to tell you about what a fashion croquis is. A fashion croquis is basically a tool that we all use; this is what it looks like. So about every fashion designer uses a fashion croquis. It just is a simpler way for us to be able to design over a body and not have to redraw a body every time that we need to draw a dress. It makes you be able to pump out as many designs as you can in less time, because you don’t have to sit there and draw legs and arms and everything every time. What we do, is we do elongate the form, and the reason why we do that, is so that we have more room to render the details of the garments that are going over them. And that’s pretty much what a fashion croquis is.

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Something that you’ll often have to do in fashion design is create pattern or texture on the fabric of the garment that you’re designing. I’m going to go with polka dots in this dress. So it can go a lot of ways, you can be very graphic about it, or you can be very literal about it. I’m going to go with the graphic approach. I just start out with darker version, I’m going to do darker blue polka dots on a lighter blue dress. You want to just keep in mind like what your spacing is.

Most of the time you’ll have a swatch of your fabric right beside your sketch, so people will get it, but it’s just all about just creating your texture, or your print, or what have you. A lot of times you don’t even have to cover your whole dress, you just do a section of it, that’s why it’s really important to have your swatch of fabric beside your dress. I don’t have a swatch of this fabric, but whatever, I guess I’ll do the whole dress then. I’m trying to like keep in mind the folds, going with a graphic quality. As you get to the edges of the dress, you go darker with your polka dots, because that is creating more shadow.

And if you really want to, you can go in afterwards with your pen and outline every single one of these polka dots, but I really don’t think it’s necessary, I think they look fine as they are. And that’s how you draw a pattern or print on a fashion illustration.

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This is how you trace a photograph. It’s actually a handy tool if you’re not the best sketcher, if you want some strange body position, what have you. Find a pose that I like, and something that’s very important in this process is tracing paper, nice and sheer, comes in all sorts of weight, etc.

All right, here we go. You get your tracing paper centered beautifully over your photograph, and of course you’re going to need your mechanical pencil, because you’re going to make a mistake, who knows, you want to be able to erase it. So you want to start out by just concentrating on the silhouette. Use your pencil, you can erase it if you mess up, it’s a great thing. And, you know, you’re just worrying about silhouette right now, you could always go back in and do the details later. I pick this particular pose because she is doing something very unusual with her body, and it’s probably the ones that you’ll want to trace, you know. I want to trace something interesting.

I don’t know how I feel about her sweater, so I’m just going to eliminate her sweater altogether and go with her arms. So basically you want to take from this her body silhouette. It’s almost like you’re looking through with x-ray vision and see what her body’s doing underneath. It’s a good way to like study how the body bends and moves, and it will give you some versatility to your sketching. Here’s her neck, her ear, face at a really strange angle, which is cool. And you know you can always go in later and do all your shading, but right now we’re just going to worry about just tracing the photograph. And if you really just want to trace the outfit itself, you can do that too. I’ll just go ahead and trace what she has on. But as I said, I’m not a big fan of the sweater, so we’re going to ignore the sweater. I’m just going to do her in a short little dress she’s got on. I’m going to add some of my own design elements because I’m not thrilled with this design.

This is also just a great way to build your sketching skills, because it gets you really comfortable with a pencil, you know, it just gets your hand into the motion of doing all of this. I’m even going to draw her shoes, because her shoes are pretty fabulous. I give her her sunglasses, her nose, which is almost strange when I took the tracing paper off, but you go back in and fix all your details later. Every once in a while you lift the tracing paper off the page, just to see if you’ve missed any elements. All right, so now we can pull it all off, and this is how you trace a photograph. It’s a great way to get really comfortable with a pencil, or create a new fashion croquis.

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One thing that you sometimes will have to do is draw hands. I particularly do not like to draw hands. I really don’t feel like it’s an integral part of the garment, it has nothing to do with the clothing, why do I need to draw hands.

Half the time I hide them behind the body like this, that helps out a lot. But if you do have to draw hands, let’s do it. So say I’m drawing the figure, and she is going to have her arm up in the air like this, just kind of follow that line, give her a neck, give her some shoulders, I’m only going to draw one of them for you, because I’m not that great at it, it’s not my favorite thing in the world. I’ll just get her torso done, and basically you could just kind of just like go with the gesture of a hand, something like this, or whatever. With enough practice you can get really good at it, but I always hide them behind the body, because I don’t feel like drawing I’m drawing hands.

So you get your thumb like this, you clean up your arm a little bit with your eraser, I just kind of just smooth out some lines, and then you can get like some separation in the fingertips. This is where I always screw up. It’s a little bit like a fin, but later on you can go in with a pen, clean it up, perfect it, that’s why we do it in pencil first. And that’s basically how you draw hands.

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Now, we’re going to fine-tune a fashion design. And, I often do this after my client has left me. Just because I have to quickly get on the page, get the point across. I’ll fine tune it, scan it and send it to them. And, it makes them feel really happy.

So, basically, you want to start with, like, doing the hair. Creating just, like, beautiful hair. So, a lot of it is, just like inking in and solidifying your lines.

Going through and like making sure that your bead work is making sense to what the final result is going to be. That’s the whole mission of this process. Is to really get the point across of like what the final result is going to be.

You also do some coloring at this point. You add more texture. She’s going to have a tulle veil. So, I’m going to add some vertical texture here. Holes, et cetera.

Her gloves are not colored. So, I’m going to go in with my marker and just, kind of, just give it just a little bit of shadow. I’ll go in with my blender marker, which is a great thing. And just kind of blend that color in.

You also want to do things like, if it’s a corset gown, she’s going to have cleavage. You want to add in your cleavage.

You definitely want to put in a face. It’s not always necessary, but for this particular bridal sketch, you want to personalize it a little bit more.

So, a good trick with drawing faces, and I might not get it right the first time, because, you know, that’s the way it goes. That’s why you do it in pencil first.

You divide the face in half, and that’s your eye line. You have one eye between the two eyes. That’s how you get your spacing. So, I just can visualize it because I’ve been doing this for awhile. Oh, that eye’s weird looking. But, you can always fix it later. That’s why we’re using pencil.

And, you can see there’s an eye between those two eyes. It looks kind of insane right now, but you’ll see when I’m done.

The nose can just be like simply, just like a little bit of an inkling of a nose. G**, what am I doing to her face? Whatever. I’ll fix it later.

And then we want to go in with just, like, a simple lip. Which I’m making big lips. She does not look like a happy bride yet. So, I’ve got to fix this.

Here we go. I’m going to keep working on this. There we go. Less is more on these faces because you don’t want her to look mean or unhappy. And I should definitely upturn her lips up a little bit so she’s smiling. She’s happy she’s getting married.

Then you want to go in with your ink and just solidify the shapes of the eyes. Her nose. Her smiling lips. Let it dry for a second before you erase the messy pencil face that I did underneath that.

Oh, no. It did smudge. That’s what we have whiteout for. Okay.

We’re going to give her some pupils. She definitely needs brows. And brows are just simple little… She’s looking a little better. Hairline needs some work. Give her a dot of whiteout under that lip that I smudged.

And, whatever. Nobody’s perfect so just keep going. You can always just, like, hone your sketch over and over and over again.

And then scan it and then send it to your happy bride. And she’ll be really happy about it. She’ll have a momento of that occasion.

And that’s basically how you fine-tune a fashion illustration.

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Sometimes what you might want to do is add detail to a fashion croquis. This might be a face, it might be hands, it might be whatever, eyelashes, whatever you want to do. You basically start out by dividing the face in half. You pretty much know that that’s where the eye line is going to be, and the eyes are separated by one eye between them. So you create almond shapes, and you imagine that there is another eyeball between them. See? Perfectly spaced. Another thing that you’re going to add to a fashion croquis is ears, which depending upon the angle of the face, will depend on whether you need to draw two ears or one.

This one only needs one ear. You can go ahead and add pupils to the eyes, and nose. Lips you start out with just like a little mark, but then you can give it some more dimension at the bottom. You can then add a line down the center, and what this will help you with is it will help you when you’re designing your clothes over the fashion croquis to have like your center line of where the clothing will lie. You can also add cross lines to it. What these do is these tell you how she’s standing, what position she’s standing in, and how you should have the clothing draping over her body. Other things you can do is you can add shoes. You can add like just the basic shape of a shoe, and I’m a big fan of the heel-less pump, so I’m just going to draw that.

Basically you can go in and hone the croquis, thin out the neck a bit. This is just like a quick draw, but I’m going to thin out her neck, because I feel like her neck is too thick. And then there’s other little things you can do, like add eyebrows, but you want to go too crazy with that, because those are the type of things you need to personalize for who you’re drawing for. And that’s basically how you add detail to a fashion croquis.

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So this is how you draw the inside of a garment, especially with the fact that high-low hemlines are in right now, and they pretty much will never go away, they’re a great thing. You start by drawing your dress, and I have a shirt-dress here that has a high-low hemline. You indicate what this hemline is doing, and then it’s a matter of just like shading lightly. And you’re going to want to use a pencil that has a soft lead, so that you can shade that later.

You can smudge it with your smudge stick, which we’ll get to at some point, when I, whatever. I’ll explain later. And basically that’s how you show the inside of the garment, because there’s shadow in there, and that’s what you want to get across. I take my smudge stick and just like smooth it out a little bit, and there we go, we show like that has some dimension to it. And if you’re doing the dress in a color, you do the same thing with a colored pencil, just use a softer lead so that it will blend beautifully. And that’s how you shade the inside of a garment.

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Something that’s really important when you come to the point of putting your line out on the market, if you’re so lucky, is you’re eventually going to have to do technical drawings of your pieces, so that the buyers can just like flip through a bunch of line sheets, they’re called, and buy what they want. All the details have to be very apparent, they need to be drawn very flat. So as you can see on this page, these are all of my cincture belts and corsets that I offer at my studio. There’s pages and pages of them, but I won’t bother to flip through.

But as you can see, all of the details are very hard lines. This one has a certain closure in the front, this is showing its bones here, there, and there. This is showing that it definitely has a seam line there, and this is the exact shape of this corset. You also have your style numbers, so that your buyer is going to know what they’re buying, and be able to call it in and be like, I need ten dozen of CD8, if you’re so lucky. So that’s the importance of technical drawings, fashion flats, line sheets, whatever you want to call them, they’re very important in fashion illustration.

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Now we’re going to draw a corset. Corsets are definitely one of my
specialties. It’s something I build into almost everything that I do.
First, you want to think about what style of corset you want to do. I’m
going to do an under the bust halter corset, which is a little invention of
mine.

First, we need to find the center of the body because when you’re drawing a
corset, the seam lines are very important because it’s all about structure.
I’m going to come up around the shoulder, up around this shoulder, like
this with her neck.

Now you really want to concentrate on getting the body in place, drawing
the rest of the body, and really getting the silhouette of the corset in
there. A corset is meant to cinch the waist, so you really want to
exaggerate that cinching of the waist through drawing it much deeper than a
natural waist would be.

Now you figure out what is my hemline of this corset going to be or the
bottom edge. I’m going to do it right about there. Now, as I said before,
we want to create all of our structural lines like this.

As you’re thinking about the corset style that you’re drawing, you want to
think about what you’re putting it over as well, not a bad idea. I’m always
drawing them with my client sitting right beside me, so I have to just
think about what’s going to look beautiful with this corset.

This corset is a halter corset. It looks great over a stretchy V-neck
dress. You get your hard lines in there. You ink them in later once you
decide on what color you’re going to do.

Now I can show you what this corset is that I just sketched. This one
happens to be beaded, so I’m going to put a little bit more beadwork in
there. That’s how you draw a corset.

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This is how you indicate a placket. Basically after you’ve already drawn your buttons, you need to indicate what they’re buttoning into, which is a placket. So I start with right on the outside of where my buttons are, you simply do a straight line, heading all the way down the front of what this is, it’s a shirt-dress.

And I usually do a little squiggle at the top and bottom to indicate where it opens up to, it’s just something that’s used in technical design drawings, but you don’t really have to do that. If you want to have exposed stitching, you could then add like a little details like this, or just stitching, like a stitched-down placket, it’s just all what you’re trying to get across, or what your design sense is. And boom, there you go, that’s you draw a placket.

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Supplies for fashion design. There are so many supplies out there that you could choose from. The best way to go about it is to systematically try different things.

You need your mechanical pencils. They’re very important. Different level leads, as far as hardness is concerned. You need to have a beautiful pen that you feel really comfortable drawing with.

From there you could start to explore how you’re going to color in your fashion illustrations. Whether you want to use pastels. Whether you want to use watercolor, gouache. Whether you want to use colored pencils. I can go, there’s many other mediums out there. But, what’s most important is to find a medium that you’re most comfortable with. And to work with it to the best of your ability.

There’s all sorts of other tools that you’re gonna need. You’re gonna need a good smudger, good smudging stick. It’s how you create all your shading. You’re going to need a great eraser. Because, lord knows, you’re gonna make mistakes. And that doesn’t matter, you can just erase it. White out is a great tool for finishing sketches. There’s all sorts of things.

Just really have fun with it and really get comfortable with using your tools. So play around. Experiment. Play around with different kinds of paper. There’s marker paper. There’s all sorts of vellums. Etcetera, etcetera. You could even use cheap, printer paper if you want. That’s a great thing to just practice on.

So those are pretty much all the supplies you need to create a fashion portfolio.