From clothes to accessories fashion illustrations have a long tradition as visual references for the ideas of a designer or fashion trends.
What is a great fashion illustration? With the help of the content of Market, let’s count down the top 10 tricks for creating stunning illustration styles to improve your sense of style and increase the quality of your illustrations!
Understand Anatomy Fashion
It’s sometimes difficult to tell if you’re viewing an image of fashion it’s obvious that the designer is at their peak when working with anatomically correct proportions. Understanding how to draw properly the body gives you an array of options in drawing figures, and also drawing clothes.
Therefore, whether drawing based on photographic references or from the real world you’ll have an understanding of the form and proportions of things that may not be apparent when drawing clothing-covered figures.
If you’re presented with a person whose body is concealed beneath a huge dress, for example, understanding the gesture underneath allows you to make poses that might not be possible to create quickly and easily.
Being capable of moving your body around without the need to copy directly from a picture or have a model create the desired pose will give you greater flexibility when your client needs a specific pose or idea.
Stylize to Optimize
If you choose to modify your appearance after gaining a basic understanding of anatomy, you’ll need to apply it to draw attention to specific elements of design. For instance, fashion-oriented figures typically have long legs and are higher than a normal human.
According to the average human size figures are about six to seven feet tall, while a fashion model is often up to nine heads tall, with the majority of the extra length concentrated in the legs. This can be used to draw attention towards the size of a dress, or allow the designer more room to fold or movement inside the fabric.
Inflate the face or the face of the person so that you can emphasize the style of the dress. A small waist or large hips are a great way to highlight the curves of the shape of a dress.
A few facial features can concentrate on the body or clothes itself. If the emphasis is on hair accessories or accessories create a big hair or make the clothes less prominent. Like cartoons and caricatures and illustrations, exaggerations reduce certain aspects or highlight others. Utilize stylization as a way to create a narrative through your style illustration.
Move With Purpose
A static fashion model is a good idea in drawing but you’ll discover that it’s a boring piece. If you’re not telling a story about the beauty of fashion, you’ll need your model to move in the area you have set. When you pose your figure in a dynamic way, you generate action for the clothes, hair and accessories, or whatever you’re creating.
Additionally, you’ll be able to improve the narrative in your drawing. Are you imagining a person walking, dancing or flying across your model plane? Answer these questions by drawing a sketch. Illustrations tell stories using images.
Moving can assist the viewer to understand the fabric the subject of your drawing. We’ll go over the texture and weight of textiles further down but remember that whether an item is fluid and flowing or stiff and heavy one of the most effective ways to display the difference is to show the way it can move when placed on the body as well as when it is moving.
One of the best ways to learn how clothing, bodies, and other materials move is to watch models stroll along an avenue. They’re always in motion and frequently make it an effort to show how their clothes move through extravagant movements and twists.
Use Your Composition to Tell Your Story
Apart from the clothes and movements that aid in your story, composition is equally important. Are they frolicking around in an empty space or is it set in a space with a backdrop and other characters?
This is the place where fashion illustration can mix and editorial illustrations. Perhaps you’d like to depict the person walking along a runway or navigating through a city.
By incorporating a basic background into your artwork can aid viewers in understanding the context behind where and when a style is sported. Be aware, however, that if your background is too busy it could make the fashion style appear a bit cluttered.
You can also eliminate some details by using your composition to to fill in the details. Maybe you’ve decided to draw lines. You can let a small portion of your model’s movements, clothes hair and dress to create a complete image without drawing it into. The eyes of the viewer will do all the rest.
Make use of negative space to make more exciting drawings without needing to make an background. Now, the white or solid color you use within your artwork is element of the design and you’re allowing the character to be present not only in that space, but as a result of the space.
Differentiate Between Fabrics With Texture
According to me, among the many enjoyable elements of fashion illustration when a designer can showcase the texture and weight of a material in their drawings or paintings.
It doesn’t matter if they’ve learned to draw corduroy, or are adept at demonstrating the fabric’s weight by moving it as a person who is a spectator and artist, enjoy be captivated by these particulars. In a flash, I can understand what I’m looking at and it’s much more real than anything else seen or worn in the same way.
It’s certainly an green dress but are they silk, tulle or a thick woven fabric? The manner in which it’s drawn, the way it is draped around a person and the manner in which it’s colored or painted should give the reader an idea of what kind of fabric being represented.
At the bare minimum I’d like to know the way a garment feels like when it’s worn. If I’m offered clothing based on images such as this I’ll be able to determine whether the clothes are comfortable and warm or breezy and light. The viewer should discern if the material is soft and smooth or hard and scratchy.
You can demonstrate that something is soft and smooth with longer, curved lines and illustrations, or demonstrate that it’s hard and itchy by using smaller, more rigid line work. In addition, drawing the knitted textures can aid the reader to understand that it’s a hand-knit sweater as opposed to a machine-woven one or a garment made from jersey.
Explore textures in textiles by sketching swatches on your clothing or playing with various styles of textiles that you might see in fashion magazines.
Make Patterns Aplenty
Surface designs are usually popular in fashion. They can make plain pieces more intriguing and can even become the focal point of an illustration. There are a limited number of silky dresses that can be walked down the runway before patterns begin popping. Being able to showcase an Moschino show using illustrations is not enough without being able to display the designs they have created for their clothing.
The patterns are also able to tell stories on their own. Traditional patterns such as houndstooth and chevrons can showcase the latest fashions or tell the story of clothes of a particular era. Take a look at the stories that can be told of people who dress in quiet, subtle patterns such as simple stripes or dots against bright, loud florals or paisley patterns.
The patterns of textiles also aid in helping to coordinate different pieces when you combine with a certain color or two of a pattern with other pieces of clothing or accessories within the same style.
This is particularly evident when you draw a line of clothing and be aware of the different pieces in the set, even though they aren’t always worn in the hands of the same individual could be able to call attention to one by using the same patterns or colors of the pattern.
Get Your Hair Done
Hairstyles, colors and textures can contribute to much to create a appearance. Different hairstyles can have different individuals because of a variety. Think about how the culture and ethnic background could influence the hairstyles an individual can choose to wear. In addition to telling an account of what the individual is, or the place they might be from and where they come from, but you’ll also have to allow for some limitations on the hair’s motion and style.
For instance, a person who has extremely thin straight hair won’t be able to put their hair with locs as those who has thick and hair with a texture. Learn how to draw curly, straight, braided or any other hairstyle can also broaden your repertoire of skills for any illustration event.
Hair can also aid in the composition, or become an important feature. For compositional purposes hair’s movement hair may be as significant in the same way as movement on clothing.
In several of the photos included in the article the majority of the hair in the illustrations is long and moves along with the dresses shown within the image. It’s worth considering hair as a different element of the illustration picture when designing fashion illustrations.
In addition, hair could be the main focus in an illustration of fashion. If the goal in the artwork is illustrate hairstyles or display different hair accessories, the hair could be the main focus of the design or is the primary focus of the action as a dress in bigger, full-body picture will. A lot of the suggestions for clothes can be applied to hair, too. Form and texture, composition, the movement and the fashion are all important factors in incorporating hairstyles into your style illustration.
Focus on Accessories
Sometimes the main focus might not be on a particular garment or hair, but rather on accessories. This could mean that a small portion or body part is the sole object depicted in an illustration, or there’s any figure in any way. In addition, you could be illustrating a fully-bodied image and accessories could be featured the majority of your image.
Take into consideration, for fully-bodied pieces what kind of stories could be told through the use of accessories. Imagine drawing a gorgeous, historical queen. What kind of attire would she be wearing? Jewelry, crowns, shoes and a scepter maybe. You can create a narrative of opulence with the additional accessories you include or by putting a small necklace or bracelet within an overall style.
Think about, when designing pieces that are focused on accessories the things you’d consider if you were drawing clothing on figures like texture, patterns composition stylizations, and much more. The same principles applicable to hair and clothing can also be applied to accessories. It’s a story told through objects that are placed on or around an object.
Think about, in the case of items that are only accessories What kind that information would you like your person looking at it to comprehend without the image. For example, if you’re just sketching a bag and shoes and a backpack, pairing them with respect to material or style could tell the story of someone who is well-put together. For instance, a pair of shoes along with a backpack could be a story of a young or a young person.
Understand Perspective
The subject of accessories takes us to yet another fundamental ability that is called perspective. Knowing how objects are placed in a space will assist you in drawing the objects in a precise manner. While stylization is always a good thing in your work, understanding the rules can allow you to break them in fascinating and appealing ways.
Take a look at the concept, discussed previously, of drawing just bags and shoes. To make those objects appear tangible, without figures within your drawing to assist to draw them, sketch them as if they do not exist only within space but are on a plane, and that someone might reach out and reach out and touch them. This will allow viewers to feel more connected with the object as well as comprehend the size and shape the object.
If you’re able to put multiple objects in a tiny scene, or floating around across space, you’ll need to demonstrate that they’re in contact. This is by demonstrating they’re on the same level and exposing both to the identical kind of perspective, as well as overlapped objects, using similar lighting, and employing the same style of design to depict the two (unless you’re making an intentional assertion in telling a tale not doing this).
Render Non-Textile Surfaces Differently
As with being able to demonstrate how objects interact with other objects within that same area, objects with no texture must be rendered in such a way that the user is aware of what’s being displayed.
For example, if you’re drawing Cinderella’s glass slipper, then you’re required to create an opaque, reflective shoe that viewers will be able to recognize as glass or something similar, and not an item that looks exactly like silk or leather shoes.
If the designer has designed an outfit that is metallic and is intending for it to be constructed of metal instead of simply being silver or gold with a different color scheme, the artist will have to show the reflective properties of this material in order to let the viewer know that it’s more than just paint making something appear like gold, but actually gold itself that’s being depicted.
Similar to showing how the material’s texture and weight and the limits of movement within the fabric and being able to render different objects in a way that viewers understand the components of them is not just a way to communicate concepts of design and story telling in a fashion illustration it also allows the viewer to connect more closely with the concept of what’s drawn as like a real-world object or material that is familiar to them.
