Lesson 4: 8 Tips to Makes a Good Fashion Drawing & Illustration

Fashion Design Presentation & Figure Drawing 

 1. Graphical Skills:

Fashion designers create and sketch garments to communicate their ideas to their design teams, pattern makers, sample operators and buyers. Fashion designers need to be able to draw to make their designs understood. They usually have little or no time to supply fashion sketches. For this reason, quick sketches to point out ideas are mostly what are required of fashion designers. 

(A) Figure Drawing:

When fashion designers need to communicate ideas to buyers quickly, the ability of drawing the idea in an attractive manner is a great asset. As designers, one must be able to see a style and analyze the major points that make it visually successful. One must be able to quickly assess proportion, silhouette and strong eye-catching details. 

(B) What are Fashion Trend and Fashion Proportions: 

• Fashion can influence how society sees the physical body . In the 18th century, plumpness was seen as a sign of wealth and health and a thin person was seen as too poor to afford enough to eat. In contrast, today’s obsession with thinness has generated a 33 billion-a-year weight-loss industry and has led to eating disorders.
• Fashion designers need to spot new trends, emerge trends and the market needs for the tomorrow world. Demographic change, new technologies and new modes of living impact significantly on the future. Today, the planet is experiencing a huge transformation .
• They will like to spend large amount of dollars on fashion apparel that fits appropriately and appeals to them. The apparel industry and fashion retailers who meet those needs will position themselves for success in the future.
• Fashion proportions, by the very nature of fashion itself, are subject to change depending on the look of the time, and these changes do not alter the structure of the human figure. The easiest way to start to draw a fashion figure is to use the head size as a measurement guide for the length and width of your figure.

(C) Basic Proportions of Female Figure for Fashion Design Drawing:

 The typical female fashion figure is illustrated as slender with square shoulders, heads drawn smaller, necks and legs longer than in the classical life drawing. In the average female’s body the head is about seven to eight times smaller than that of the total height of the entire figure. For fashion drawings, this increases to nine to 10 times or more. Fashion drawings retain the basic proportions of the human form from the head to the crotch. Extra length is added to the legs to give dramatic, stylish look and to give clothing livelier and appealing.

8-Heads

9-Heads

10-Heads

(F) What Makes a Good Fashion Drawing? 

(i) Composition and Well Planned Layout 

The positioning of the drawing on the page and the relationship of one drawing to another are all important because they help create a design image. Relate the sketch to the space and other sketches around it so as to create an interesting, stimulating and harmonious total effect. Individually, sketches can look flat and uninteresting but if all the right ingredients are grouped together in a well planned layout, the theme will be strong and extremely successful. 

(ii) Right Purpose 

The drawing should consider the purpose and objective of the presentation; it may be for a fashion prediction board or fashion design board displaying the fashion trends. It could even be for a fashion presentation board, forecasting drawing, promotional fashion illustration or advertisement for magazines. The drawing should be created depending on the target market, project brief and the purpose of the drawing board. 

(iii) Understanding Construction and Form 

A design drawing is usually an interpretation of a three-dimensional form during a two-dimensional way. It is important that the structure of the three-dimensional form is clearly expressed and defined by the use of tone and texture. 

(iv) Awareness of Body Perspective and Proportion 

Good drawings need not be photographically accurate. It is still essential to show how scale and proportion are observed and re-create such factors in your drawings. Understanding body perspective also will assist you draw the right proportion of the figure in various poses. 

(v) Rhythm of Line 

The mood and shape of the design are developed by the thickness of lines. Drawing figures using one continuous line, avoid the messy broken lines.

(vi) Effective Use of Paper and Media 

Drawings should not only be done in pencil, the use of various media should be explored given that these media help to make the ideas more clear. Work on different colored papers, use various colors for outlines and experiment with all media and combinations.

(vii) Evidence of Observation

 Design drawing should show the ability to observe how a basic garment looks, showing many details and embellishments are observed such as how a collar forms part of the neckline, how a conventional garment looks, its zipper fastening and the proportion of the collar or cuffs to the rest of the garment. 

(viii) Evidence of inquiry 

Drawing may be a sort of exploration and the way to explore and record ideas, forms, shapes and emotions.