#137...fashion sketching

A few years ago I took a fashion sketching course through a local college that was one of the best yet most challenging courses I've ever taken. The fashion figure is called a croquis, and is used by fashion designers to show garment designs on a human form prior to production. There is an art to drawing a croquis that extends far beyond sketching a cute skirt on a stick figure. Proportion, anatomy and movement of the croquis are all key to a successful fashion sketch. Here is a sampling of what I learned about fashion sketching.

Using a ruler and inch measurements we learned the fashion figure is 10 heads high, and in these sketches 1 head= 1 inch

The shoulders fall at 1.5 inches, the bust at 2 inches, hip at 4 inches and so forth until you get down to the ankle at 9.25 inches.

After practicing our 10 inch stick-like figures for weeks, learning to draw it without the use of a ruler, we moved on to adding curves to our form, with a lesson in musculature and bone structure.

 Above is my croquis with her curves, before we began learning how to move her.

To begin drawing figures in movement, we resorted back to ruler work and this time used various angle calculations and a lot of geometry to move her off of center axis. (I was never very good at any type of spatial math, so I thought this was really hard)

To practice finding different poses to draw, we cut up our croquis and turned them into paper dolls that we could move their limbs around. Above is my assignment for this process, where I created a velcro board to show the croquis in motion.

Fast forward two semesters, and we finally got to add color and clothing to our croquis. Below are a few of my final project designs in which I designed a resort collection. I used water color pencils and ink on the croquis, and spray paint, splatter paint and collage to create my background papers.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my fashion sketches, as they have been hiding in a portfolio case for awhile now, and when I came across them in my January cleaning efforts, they made me smile remembering the hard work and care that went into this class.