4 Kinds of Fashion Design Sketching

Hey hey party people. Today we're going to talk about illustration within the context of a fashion designer's career. If you want a conversation about fashion illustration within the context of an illustrator's career go watch my interview with fashion illustration agent Marcus Khan. I'll drop a link below but today we're going to talk about illustration's role in a fashion designer's career because I get questions about this all the time and hopefully I'll be able to knock out all the answers to all the questions that I have been getting about this. And you know the drill. Please share, subscribe, check the description box for more info and links to all the good stuff. It would be awesome if you hit that little join button below to support my channel. I love you. Let's move on. Now I'm gonna bite the bullet and say this is all my fault. Okay maybe not a hundred percent but like a lot percent my fault because here's the deal. I am a fashion designer and a fashion design teacher and I do some other things and I teach other things but my focus and the things that I like best and the things I have most experience in is fashion design and teaching fashion design and so people land on my channel or my Instagram and think holy crap I need to draw like her to become a designer. There's no freaking hope for me. What the hell? I think I'm a good designer or I can become one with some practice but I can't draw like that. I can't paint individual highlights and shadows on individual pearls. Do I need to buy a whole set of watercolor brushes to become a designer? No no no no no I can't do that. I give up. Now first of all calm down and get yourself a cup of tea some herbal stuff like peppermint because you clearly don't need any more caffeine if you're having a full-blown panic attack right now. Here's the thing people don't talk about enough that I'm going to share with you. Fashion school doesn't teach you all the things that you need for your whole career. They can't because they don't know where your career will go and neither do you. Fashion school even the best ones can only teach you what you need for the first years of your career according to your major. If your major is fashion design school can only prepare you to get those first jobs out of school those assistant designer jobs those associate designer jobs. They can't prepare you for the creative directorships and VPs of merchandising. You know they laid the initial foundation for you and it's your responsibility to build on that foundation of skills that you learn throughout your career until eventually you get that top job. So how do you get those initial jobs? By having an amazing portfolio. You don't have a lot of experience. Your resume looks like thinly sliced Swiss cheese. Your references usually can't be trusted. It's really going to be your portfolio that gets people interested. Have you ever tried to read an article or an essay or a book and the grammar and the kind of words they use kept getting in the way and you decided it was not your job to weed through all the convolution and you quit reading and people kept saying oh no you know the plot is so good and you're like the plot is buried under 392 layers of mistakes and I can't. Within the context of design I repeat within the context of design illustration is like this okay the design is the book's plot an essay's thesis an article is a main point and the illustration is word choice grammar syntax how the words flow the aura created by the word choice to illustrate the concept more richly more clearly more beautifully. If you can write beautifully with perfect grammar but have no concept no one will care. If you have a great concept but can't really share that with people that's an uphill battle. If you have a great concept and you can write it beautifully winner winner chicken dinner and not gonna lie if you have a medium good concept and illustrate it beautifully you can convince people the design is even better because that's how brains work most of the time. Later on in your career as you work jobs and you can add things from those jobs to your portfolio like look books and line sheets sketching skills won't matter as much your portfolio will be full of your professional experience from those jobs and projects you will have gotten better at adobe illustrator and drawing flats your resume will be better fleshed out and the things that were so vitally important in the beginning like illustration to express your design ideas will be less and less important by the time your creative director your concepts your big picture direction of the company your vision those things will be increasingly more important than little individual skills. Now back to me and why I like to paint showgirls wearing nothing but flowers and feathers and rhinestones. I don't have your typical designer's career trajectory. Number one I've always loved drawing from childhood it's literally my favorite thing. Two my alma mater Otis College of Art and Design had a really strong fashion illustration program that was deeply intertwined with the design program. Most of the illustration work came directly from our design classes. If we were doing a denim project we were illustrating denim one project we were doing pinstripe wool and lace so we practiced pinstripe wool and lace in illustration class that's just how that program was. Disclaimer I don't know if they still do that because I went to school 20 years ago literally so and number three I took all kinds of illustration side gigs throughout my career because I enjoyed it. Four I fell in love with teaching and taught both design and illustration but more importantly I taught illustration mainly to design students so to be a better teacher I continued to practice drawing and rendering learning new media continued in a rather academic style of rendering focusing on showing off design accurately more than artistic expression for the my design students. So while my bosses oohed and aahed over my sketches during job interviews I didn't do a lot of illustration in those jobs some more than others you know and when you see my illustrations one don't assume you can never be good at drawing I've literally been drawing since I could hold a pencil. Two don't assume you need to paint as well as I do to have a career in fashion design and on that note let's talk about the four most common types of sketching in fashion design who uses them who needs to learn them when they'll be used and why. One hand-drawn flats this is the easiest way to express your designs if you can't draw and I say can't draw in quotes but if you want to design sketch out your flats using a flat template you don't have to figure out bodies drapes folds you're not even supposed to draw drapes and folds in flats unless it's part of the design construction like a pleat or a ruffle. Use a template for just rough sketches of ideas you don't need to but flats templates make everything faster and easier and you can even use a ruler if you want. All fashion designers should know how to do basic hand flats whether you are looking for an industry job working for yourself what have you you know maybe not the most absolutely meticulous symmetrical flats that you would put in a portfolio project but every designer should be able to draw quick hand flats. If you're a business owner this is really all you need if you can't draw and you don't want to learn learn how to do some basic hand flats to communicate with your team what you want this is typically good enough to hand over to a tech designer or a pattern maker. Number two Adobe Illustrator flats. People ask me all the time if I can recommend cheaper software. The industry wants Adobe skills all the industry jobs list Adobe as the desired software skill so I'm going to keep telling you to use Adobe. This is not me this is the industry. If you don't know I run a fashion job site called threaded.space and I'll drop a link to that below and I see a lot of job ads. If you want an assistant designer associate designer job in the industry you need to learn Adobe Illustrator flats. All flats should show front and back of garments. You can show the sides if that really helps explain a more complicated construction. You should be drawing your flats as a series of shapes not lines because you want to be able to fill them in with color because some companies want to do that. As in if you draw a jacket front create an entire enclosed shape. Okay draw the sleeve shape under the front and then later on when you fill in the flats with color you have the option to do a contrast color for the sleeves as well. If you're not looking for an industry job I guess you can just keep drawing hand flats. If you keep having communication problems because your flats are that bad maybe you should learn Adobe or hire someone. A great way to start that works for a lot of people is to draw some flats out by hand using a template and then trace them in Adobe Illustrator still using the same template. Eventually you'll get the hang of how to draw without hand sketching beforehand. Muscle memory makes the workflow. Number three. Hand drawn sketches on croquis. Listen to me. Use a figure template. This is not a sales pitch. You can buy one of mine. You can make your own. You can buy one from someone else but use it. Designers do not have the time to draw a fresh figure from scratch every time they get an idea. Ain't nobody got time for that. These can be simple pencil sketches or what I like to do is make some copies black and white and test them out using different colorways. Using marker on photocopy paper is not the most beautiful thing in the world but it works fine for this kind of thing. Or you could put the flat under a sheet of translucent marker paper and test out colorways that way. This is the kind of sketch for designers who visualize better on a body. Who want to see how the proportions work. Maybe you want to see how the drapes hang and wrap off a body. These sketches are fast. They're loose. They're just to get the down onto paper before you forget. This is note taking. This is drawing as note taking. Jotting out ideas to play with concepts. Draw various iterations. Brainstorming. Messing around before you do a concrete flat. Number four. Fully rendered illustrations. As I said before this is a type of sketching that is only required for designers who want an industry design job working for someone else or to start their careers that way. Tech designers don't need fully rendered illustrations. You know if you want to add a special touch. Make your portfolio look extra special. Maybe you can add them if this is something you're good at. But your adobe flats and tech packs will be more important. Pattern makers definitely don't need these. Business owners do not need to learn how to render. For design portfolios fully rendered fashion sketches should be accompanied by adobe illustrator flats of all the clothes rendered. And you don't have to do front and back figures but you do need front and back flats. The focus of these sketches is design communication. So accurately depicting the shape, the seams, the details, the textures are far far more important than gesture or artistic expression. These renderings can also be drawn out using figure templates and I recommend that. For painting I tape a template to the back of a watercolor piece of watercolor paper and use a light box to use the template. These renderings can be done in your medium of choice but marker, some combination of watercolor and gouache or some digital media are the most common and desired. A good video to watch after this one is how to get a fashion job which I'll link below. Okay now we've covered the four types of fashion sketching designers need to worry about. What you see on the screen right now is more fashion illustration for illustration's sake. The whole thing is free-handed, it's fun, it's loose, the designs are unplanned and not that important. It's more about the impact of the colors and the brush strokes and honestly the fun of painting. But designers don't need to learn how to do this kind of thing. I do it for fun. All right until next time keep putting in the work and remember we are not made of magic we are made of practice and I will see you in the next video.