Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Fashion on paper

Before great designs materialise into something tangible, come the fashion illustrations. With some paper, pencil, watercolour (or some other medium) and of course a little imagination, these drawings have never failed to amaze me.

Last year, I took up a part time fashion illustration course to learn how to draw a perfect body, poses and of course the clothes. Armed with my 2B pencil, colour pencil and a layout pad, I learnt the art of translating my ideas into illustrations and designs.

While I'm still exploring and learning, I like to turn to these books that I bought a few years back when I was in Barcelona. These reference books and art cards show the illustrations and designs of the past. Though dated, its still inspiring to just flip through them.




The other source of inspiration is none other than the Internet. Google 'fashion illustration' and so many images and blogs will come up. The first of my favorite fashion illustration blogs is none other than Garance Dore, a fashion blog peppered with street style and fashion illustrations. Garance, who with her cute captions and pretty drawings, manages to capture carefree and stylish women around the world.



Paper Fashion is another recent blog that I found which has gorgeous illustrations using mainly watercolour. Katie Rodgers, the lady behind the illustrations transforms runway inspiration to whimsical art.



I hope these sources will inspire you to pick up a pencil and start drawing away too!


Images by myself, Garance Dore and Paper Fashion



♥,
Fal

2 comments:

  1. I love both Garance's website as well as Paperfashion!

    I've been trying to learn how to draw people- fashion illustration mainly. I'm just so bad at drawing faces/figures. All my drawings manage to make the people look disfigured!

    Any advice?

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  2. Hey Pooja,

    There's actually a basic method for all beginners when they start learning fashion illustration. Its called the 9 heads method. There are quite a few steps, but I found this video tutorial on youtube that might be useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ5ciSTcCdc&feature=related

    Another tip is to use a layout pad which has really thin paper. After you draw out the 9 heads template, you can trace it on another paper to smoothen out all the sharp edges and add in the curvatures of the body. That way, you will have a proportionate body!

    As for the face, I usually look at magazines and try to follow the facial features of the models. To get proportionate features, you can draw a vertical line that divides the face into half, and 3 horizontal lines to mark out where the eyes, nose and lips should go.

    Hope this helps! (:

    Fal

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