If you’re a born artist, doing fashion illustration will certainly come easily to you. But if you want to draw but hate the way your figures come out, I can give you some tip to draw better fashion figure.
When drawing fashion illustrations, you first create a rough sketch of the body, also referred to as a croquis. Here’s how to begin drawing a croquis based on a full-body picture of a model from a magazine. You will need a pencil, a black pen, some tracing paper, sketch paper, and a fashion magazine.
1. Lay tracing paper over a full-body picture of a model from a magazine and trace around the perimeter of her body using a pencil.
2. Draw lines to show the angles of the shoulders and hips. Trace a center line down the front of her body and draw an oval for the head.
3. Break your figure down into basic shapes, using trapezoids for the torso and cylinders for the arms and legs. Include circles for the elbows and knees. Breaking the body down into basic shapes simplifies the drawing process.
4. Remove the tracing paper from your model. On a piece of sketch paper, redraw your fashion model freehand, but lengthen the torso, arms, and legs. At this point it’s very helpful if you have any basic fashion figure drawing ruler based on eight or nine heads body proportions. You will know exactly how long the torso, arms and legs should be. The new figure should be taller and narrower and has a smaller head and longer neck in comparison to the rest of her body. Fashion figures almost always have long, slim torsos and long, slender limbs, which make the clothes look better.
5. Use a black pen to draw over the areas of the body that you want to show and erase all unnecessary pencil lines.
Don’t worry if your fashion figure doesn’t turn out exactly how you want her to look. Perfecting your drawing skills takes time and practice.
