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This is the first article in a series titled "So You Think You Can't Draw." This series is about showing that even people who think they will never be able to draw, can draw. Trust me, I'm not a very good artist and I figured it out...which makes me the perfect person to write this column!
For many many many years I said that I could not be a fashion designer because I can't draw. I was dead-set on the idea that I was absolutely utterly incapable of drawing. I was wrong but I did have a huge mental block to overcome and if you believe you are incapable of drawing you are going to have to overcome that mental block as well. Sure, you may not know how yet. Sure, you may not be the best there is. But I'm telling you that doesn't really matter unless you want to become an illustrator and if that's the case I'm going to tell you right now to get a clue. Trust me, if I can draw this, anyone can:
Seriously, if you have desires to create beautiful illustrations and get paid for creating art work, but you also think you can't draw, who are you kidding? Right? I'm not being harsh here, just being honest. Illustrators are real talents. These are people who were born with a crayon in their hand and made you hate them in 3rd grade because you could barely draw a smiley face and they were pulling off perfect likenesses to Barbie. Let's face it, illustration is a talent. Illustrators can improve their skills, definitely, but someone without that talent is not going to be an illustrator no matter how hard they try.
Luckily for you and me, we do not need illustration talent to draw or sketch fashion designs. All we need to be able to do is to represent the clothing that we see in our heads in 2-dimensional form on paper. In fact, you may be surprised to know this, but a large majority of industry-working fashion designers are not very good at drawing. Trust me on this one. Designers need to be creative and need to understand fabric and the way it can flow and drape on the body. They also need to be able to communicate their designs to patternmakers, factories, and people on their staff. They do not need to know how to make works of art, or even how to draw very well at all.
A lot of fashion designers communicate their ideas by using working drawings only. Working drawings (or flats) are to-scale 2-dimensional representations of a piece of clothing as if it were laid on a table spread out flat. You may also hear the term technical drawing but technical drawings tend to be more accurate, however I have heard all three of these terms used interchangeably. Please share your comments on this one as it is a long debate and I'd love to hear them. Trust me when I say anyone can learn to do flat drawings. So if you really, truly are a complete write-off when it comes to creative drawing, it's okay, just use flats. But really, I encourage you not to give up there.
Many designers never learn how to draw clothing on a body freehand, not in a believable way however. When I was in school I remember some students who were absolutely stubborn about the instructor's demands to use a template under their work. The instructor, rightfully so, told us that your designs will not look believable, nor professional, if the body wearing them is not balanced in a natural position and so she had us draw over templates. Several students had already been sketching designs for quite some time before taking this course and would not use the templates. Their drawing skills were much stronger than some other students in the class, however their sketches looked "off". Something just seemed wrong about them and they did not look as good as they could have if the students had used templates.
The idea is, you are going to have to draw correctly many many times using the template before you develop that 6th sense that allows you to draw correctly without a template. Some designers never move away from using a template. It can be limiting, yes of course, but if it improves the readability of your sketches then use them. Some fabulous resources for free templates (also called croquis) which you can download are Free Croquis, Designer's Nexus, and Ms. David's Online Classroom (ignore the bad site design, the website has some good information). All three of these resources have both sketching templates (models in poses) and also flat templates. The first two even have examples of flat drawings you can look at to see what the difference is between a sketch and a flat. Another great resource for flat templates (these are the ones I use -- for flats you should use the same ones so that there is consistency in the scale of your clothes) is the Threads Magazine website.
Your assignment until the next article is to start collecting these templates. To use them you just put a piece of white paper on top and draw the clothes but if you're not ready for that yet, just collect them and meet me back here in a couple of weeks!
If you liked this article, you might like these drawing books:
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Tuesday, 22 September 2009
This is the first article in a series titled "So You Think You Can't Draw." This series is about showing that even people who think they will never be able to draw, can draw. Trust me, I'm not a very good artist and I figured it out...which makes me the perfect person to write this column! For...
© 2010 - Fashion Students Online
Comments
The problem is, most artists are not good instructors and most people who are good at teaching are not good at the thing they teach. In art courses only people that are good at doing the art tend to be hired (which totally makes sense) but that makes it difficult to learn from them. The best example I can give is in university in a sciences program quite often the instructors you think are the best will readily admit that they don't know something when you ask them (that's what makes them so good) and you learn from them very easily because they teach you how to think and you can continue learning on your own. On the other side of things the instructors that are brilliant are the worst teachers and quite often even really smart kids struggle to learn from them.
I think it's because people that are really good at things never had to "learn" them, they just understood / were good (though obviously they would learn about the topic, but the topic itself (art, whatever) was not ever difficult for them. People that are not naturally good at something had to go step by step and so they are able to teach those steps.
I'm glad you're finding the articles helpful!! :)
You know, the older the book is, I swear the better it is!! The styles might not be modern but the instructions are usually really good
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