Fashion Design: Introduction to Hand Drawn Technical Flats

1. Trailer: My name is Robert Geller. I'm a fashion designer, I specialize in men's wear. I am from, you don't need to know I'm from Germany. That's fucking boring. I'll do it again. The class that I'm teaching is drawing technical flats by hand. If you take a garment and lay it down flat, that's sort of how the drawing looks in the end. It's basically how we communicate with pattern maker. So for the project at the end of the class, I'm going to ask students to create three technical flats, one of a pant, one of a jacket, one of a shirt. We're going to choose what we think is the best work from the students. The winner will have a personal portfolio review with me. I love all the things that happen. I love all the little smudges. I love all the little imperfections. It makes it look like something that a human created. That's sort of the beauty of the style of drawing. 2. Tools and Materials: So, this is going to be an introduction to the materials that I use. I think I'm going to start with the most essential, which is a pencil. I use a very, very simple HB pencil, so the eraser tends to disappear fairly quickly so I always have another larger eraser. So, another thing is the sketchbook. I like the moleskin ones without lines. It's just nice and flat that you can open it nicely and lay it down, but you can just grab a piece of paper as well or whatever you want to have with you. I keep it on my bedside table and I keep it in my pocket. Another thing that we'll be doing later is filling in the drawings with marker. So, there's a million companies that make these markers. I like Copic, C-O-P-I-C, or Japanese. They're highest quality but also the most expensive, and I don't think you need them. Utrecht makes really nice ones as well. Prismacolor, there's a ton. For these markers, I usually just get a range of grays. If you want to get into detailed illustrations, it's a whole another issue and you can get different colors. I suggest getting four variations of the warm grays. It looks really nice together and you can definitely see the differences. We get to the paper. So, when you're starting your first flat technical drawing, you can do it on a regular piece of paper. But what you're going to be doing afterwards is you're going to be going off the first one that you create, you're creating a very simple basic shape, and then you can create whatever you want on top of that. So, I have this Canson Vellum and it's kind of a translucent paper, it's really nice for tracing. Then, I have tons of rulers. So, this company is called C-Thru, it's like the letter C and then thru. What's nice about them is that you can see exactly your measurements and how far you're going underline underneath. So, when you're doing top stitching and all that stuff, this is really, really helpful. We have different shapes, different lengths, one inch, two-inch wide. For buttons and all sorts of things round, we have a circle ruler but you can also use coins. This is easier. Another ruler that's very important is this strangely shaped one, you call this the French curve and this is really good for all sorts of non-straight lines. So you have all kinds of angles of curvature on this thing. You'll see later how I use it. It's very good for arm holes, and neck lines, and stuff like that. So, the French curve. Then, I always have, for the last section, I'm teaching you when doing layout, you need a large ruler because you're going to do some things sort of in life size and you always need to do a lot of long straight lines. For measurements, you need a measuring tape, very simple. Pattern paper or also called ABC paper. It's basically paper that has a grid of numbers and letters, and I think each square is an inch by an inch. So, it really helps you with layouts and seeing where you at. So if you have that, we can move on to step number 2. 3. Sketching: In this section, I'm going to teach you guys about just quick sketching. This is about getting your idea onto the paper fairly quickly, doesn't have to be an accurate sketch, there's no measurements, it's just like, "I have an idea and I want to get it onto the paper." It's a class, let's think about a bomber, which is my favorite piece, so, I'm going to start showing you how to do a quick sketch of a bomber jacket. You always want the pencil to be really sharp because you can get the most details with a sharp pencil. And here's the key, I think to any drawing is to start off very light handed. Start creating your join, somewhere that you can barely see it and then once you found where you want to go with it, then you can always go in afterwards again and cement it onto the page. So, you want to start with a basic outline, you just start at the neck line, then go down the shoulders. There usually add a little bit of a slope. So, you want to keep everything mirrored in the beginning as much as possible then this line is very important, this where you're taking in the arm hole. So, you just bring it in, bring it backup, it gives a little bit of a fold to the chest. It'll make sense once I keep going down. Then you want to bring in the body, all right? That usually comes in here. Pull that down. However long you want, I mean doing a bomber means definitely varying length but you said to have a sense of the body. All right? So you blocked out the body shape, you can go rounder, you can go narrower, you can do whatever you want, however you want it, however you want this thing to fit and then bring in the sleeves. So, you have this overhang and you just bring it down, you can do these little curves along the way which will bring it a little bit of movement into it later but you just pull these straight down if that's the shape that you're designing. If you're doing more of a shaped sleeve, you can go more rounded or any details you can put on here on a bomber. Usually have this rib at the bottom, rib always wants to come in a little bit because that's the purpose it holds it in a little bit, the collar that stands up like this. This looks like the back now. This is basically how you would draw back but since you are putting in the front details you want to find a place where you think that you're going to end the opening for the neck. Then you just pull down your lines from here, there are on a bomber through ends at this point, so we pull it from here as well but it meets up front. The key to sketching is looking, really. If you're not sure how to draw something just look at the actual piece that you have, or you can look online, look at a bomber, look at any jacket you can see the details and then you can go back and you can just draw it. It's really one of the main things is I was starting to draw was really learning how to look at things and taking the time to study the object that's in front of you. So, doing very basic drawing, we're going to have the zipper coming down the front, for red material, it's nit and it's used for usually hems of things like the hem of a jacket, to keep it pulling or at the sleeve carf. The way you draw that is really just parallel lines, coming down to just want them evenly spaced. So, anybody who read that has rib, we have the rib down here as well but rib does not continue all the way to the front because it just wouldn't hang that nicely. Then you bring your sleeve down because the sleeve when you drop from the front would be partially hidden. Imagine it laying down on the table again, that's why part of it is hidden behind the body. So, you have that, you probably want to add some ribbon to that as well, most bombers have the ribbon. But you can add your details however you want that's the point, right? It's just sort of showing you the basic proportions. One the bombers that I've done in the past, we did this detail where we pulled a seam from here and here down and then we added the pocket here. A little hint for the sketches, if you want to bring some little bit of movement into it, that really makes it look a little bit nicer, you do this like squiggly lines. It's all about very light pencil, just bringing in a little bit of motion. So for the sleeves, sleeves will be pushed down there will be a little bit of a fold there. So, you just bring these little guys in there. You can see when I was drawing the sleeve, there's also that squiggle, you can bring that into the body a little bit, here, here as well. Just gives it a little bit of a movement or something, it doesn't make it look so stiff. Then I usually put in little tag, to know that's Robert Geller drawing. So another detail that I put on this is a little snap closure. So I just put that right here very quickly for me to reference later on. I know that this is a zipper, I don't really need to do much to it and that's your very basic bomber quick sketch. If you want it to look nice or you can take a pencil and go with a little bit heavier hand and you can just outline it which makes it pop off the page a little bit more. It's a neat little trick that's super easy to do but just makes the drawing look a little bit nicer. There you go. The general steps for creating all these quick sketches is, now you start with getting the silhouette, the shape down first very light and very basic. Ones that looks good, you start working on the details where does the pockets go? Where is the zipper? All of those things. Next is you want to add the rib and also a little bit more texture details and in the end you want to work with the life giving lines, a little squiggles and stuff and if you feel like you can finish it off with a heavier outline. I would love for the students to try, either imagine something like imagine a design that you've been thinking about or if you don't have that, at this point, just take it one of your jackets and do a quick sketch of it. Look at outline, look at sort of the shape of it, you can lay it down on your table or put on a hanger and just look at it and try to bring the details onto the page or try to bring the shape onto the page and just very quickly, very easily see where you are at with that. So the difference between this sketch and a technical sketches is that nothing is accurate, there's no rule that is being used, it's nothing really measured. This is me actually being a little more careful than usual with the proportions, sometimes I just get it down and it's just one shoulder slopes like this, ones like this but it doesn't matter. It's really what's important about this is that where is the replacement? Where are these pockets? What is the style line? Those are the things that you're really putting down and then you can work out about proportions and all of that in the technical flat. 4. Sketching (continued): So, I think I'm going to start with the collar and decided to do is sort of Modo stand collar on this which just basically a banded collar that overlaps, and this is going to be that double breasted slanted bomber. Just to give you a quick hint in terms of drawing different kinds of collars, you always have the sort of the back neck line which you build things on top of so if you have just a banded or stand collar what you call it. It raises in the back, right? And then, small curve to meet at the center front. Now, this is the width of it so that would follow exactly the top of that line just the shaping and the width as you like. So, that's your basic stand collar on a shirt. You'd have your button here or just little overlap, it depends. For this, I'm doing a little bit of a shape at the end so close over there. If you want to do what's called a convertible collar which is like any shirt has. You have a collar stand and then you have the top collar which is folds down, pretty simple as well. Start with that. You have the collar stand. Find the point where you want to go, meets in the middle, this goes out looks very much similar except that it's not as rounded. Then, you basically have the convertible part, the top collar. Coming down here, you can do it rounded, you can do it straight, depends, that's all your designs. So, you have that but you want to show the collar stand which is right here and most likely there'll be a button in the center. Mostly like you'll see the end of that tab here and from there you'll continue the shirt. Last one I'm going to show you is a kind of a turtleneck. Can also start the back collar, you won't be able to see it in the end so you always want to erase obviously these parts in the end because that's going to be hidden. Turtlenecks are very rounded. Let's begin with not as deep as a normal collars. You pull that up. Folds back down. So, you want to show that layering. Opens up the same angle that you have here you want to have in the front. Straight back. You probably want to add a little bit of movement because it's usually stacked. Putting in some of these lines. Basically, that's a turtleneck shape. Again, it's very basic. You look at it, you look at turtleneck, you study it, you can draw it. So, I want to take a second to show you how to draw a zipper. It's pretty straightforward, really. If you have a line which is your end of your scene and then you're going to show a little bit of super tape which is the bit that the zipper teeth are attached to. So, the way that the zipper is made, you have this tape, this fabric, and then you have these metal teeth or plastic teeth that interconnect to close the zipper. So, the burs exposed which is almost most times you're going to have a little part that's the zipper tape and then you have a little part that's teeth. They're usually about the same size so I'm just going to give you a little section of it. So, the way I draw, if it's open so you have the tape which you don't really doing anything too but then the zipper teeth you can just draw with parallel lines and everybody can recognize that as being the zipper. While I'm at it I can start explaining top stitching because you're going to use to sew this zipper into this garment. So, top stitching, if you look at a stitch. You seeing the thread coming in and going out, some people do it like that. But you drive yourself crazy so what I do is I just line up the ruler and I've put pressure release pressure put pressure where these pressures so it's just doing the steps of pushing down and it creates something that looks like a like a stitch and it's much faster. Okay. So, I'm going to do a couple of variations of pockets. Just your very basic ones that you see most of the time on jackets. So, you have the wealth pocket which basically is. If one piece of fabric, it's like a little piece you're going to have to put top stitching around it. All right.. So, if you think of a blazer or something like that, sometimes for instance the chest pocket, just like that one piece of material, sometimes white or sometimes just smaller, that's the single well pocket. On the more tailored garments you wouldn't put up stitching. On the more sort of sporty and a bomber jackets you you would put the top stitching. All right. Single wealth. Then you have the double wealth which is basically the same thing but it's two pieces. Not a perfect one but just to, for the sake of time, you basically have two of these pieces and they meet like this and you open the through the center. Then, you have a flap pocket. Here the flap coming out. Sometimes it has a well, sometimes it doesn't have a well, but basically it's just a flat that covers the opening of the pocket. I'll drew one more patch pockets. So, this flap, this is the patch. Patch is basically taking just a piece of fabric folding the edges in and attaching it to the outside of the garment with top stitch, usually runs around here. These ones the pocket bags are inside. So, your actual put the belongs only the inside of the jacket. So, those are the basic ones. Besides the seam pocket, you just have a seam, and then the top stitching, and then the pocket goes in there. It's called the seam pocket. Those are your basic pockets. 5. Line Weights: So, you might see that in this drawing there are different line weights. You can see that this line, compared to the outside line that this is much heavier, much darker, much lighter. You have these little squiggles that are very light, I do them light on purpose. That's because, that gives it some depth, you can really create depth with different sort of line weight. I want to show you how that's done with a pencil. This technique is something that I always teach all of my assistance and interns when they start working for me. Because I love, I would love them to draw like this. Where we start and some people are very heavy handed and some people are really light drawers and I like them to have both, so if you see a line you can start. Super light that you barely see and with this kind of pencils you get harder it looks like it's coming forward, right? Then you get lighter it kind of disappears again. So, that's the power of the amount of pressure that you have, really, whatever is lighter that goes into the back and whatever is darker pops up towards you. So, what i like to do is, I like to start drawing sort of very light, as light as possible. This is sort of the searching lines right, that you're doing, and then you can kind of see the proportions but it's not, you're not finalizing anything, you're not really committing yourself to anything. So, you kind of lightly find the shape, and then you can say, "I really like this then the neck to be a little bit wider," you can just add that on it's very very easy. So, and now it looks nice, you can start to really push it in, with a little bit of a heavier hand. It creates like a dimension already, right? There's a history there, and you're creating sort of the new. Whatever's new on top of it, if you want to accentuate. I really want this to be about this kind of very beautiful pointy almost pagoda shoulder. Putting in here, just go a little bit darker on these edges and you bring that in and the I automatically kind of goes to that dark points. So, that's kind of a way of accentuating things along the way, because light lines I said really good for these little squiggles that you put in that just means. You don't even realize it when you first looking at it, but it creates a really sort of interesting effect when you're working on. The closer you get the more that you put in the details, the darker you want to get. So, in the end you don't want to go heavy on everything, but you want to you want to pick out the important bits. Like all the details and things and you get this kind of interesting dynamic in the drawing. 6. Creating Slopers for Tops: This section, I'm going to be creating a sloper for a top, which you're going to use for the jackets and the shirts, and I'm going to create a sloper for the pants, which you can use for shorts, or any kind of bottom. So, a sloper is a very basic shape, which you're going to be sort of laying underneath your technical flats. This is for you to just kind of like, you don't have to start over every time with making the basic shape. You put this underneath, and from this, you can go wider, narrower, longer, shorter, anything that you want, and then you add your details to the new drawing. This is basically like an outline for you to kind of get started, it's like a little bit of a cheat sheet or something. So, very basically, we're going to start with a centerline. This paper is nine inches wide, so we're going to go four and a half, four and a half. It really just needs to be straight, kind of centered. So, you have that line, and that's your orientation point from everything. This is what I go off of like, usually, my proportions for a top to where I'm starting off, of course I'm changing it all the time, but you can go with the four inches wide by six inches long and that's a pretty good starting point. So, we're just going to mark that on the shoulders. So, four inches wide and then I go two and two. These lines should be pretty low and then we're going to do six inches here. So, that's going to be the top of your collar and this is going to be the bottom of your sleeves. This is really just to get your basic shape and from that, you put that on top of, underneath a piece of velamen, then you change your wider, you go smaller, you can go anywhere that you want. But I want to show you a very basic shape for men's outerwear. I mean this can work also for shirting. For shirting, I just take everything in maybe by 10 percent. So, these are your shoulders you want to think about sort of where's your proportionate for your neck opening. So, you can start with about an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter, total, I think that looks maybe a little bit wide, so we can take it in a little bit. So, all the adjustments that you can make, and then we have the night drops. So, this is basically, this shape that you have, like on the jacket's opening. You want to very lightly put that line in. So, it's kind of curved in the front, straighten the back, and this is the first step from your original quick sketch. You're going to go in and I'll show you with a ruler and straighten everything out but first you want to make sure that the proportions are to your liking. So, shoulder drop, you definitely want there to be an angle but you don't want it to be too severe. I think if we go here, that's about a three quarter inch drop from the back of your neckline and you have the four inches to the side. So then you just connect those two lines and see how that feels. You can always go back and open up the neckline or drop the shoulder more. I think that might be a little bit shallow. So, we want to drop it a little bit more. This also depends on, if you're making the blazer with a very strong shoulder, you want this to be kind of higher. If you want something that's a little bit more round, you can put a little bit more rounded, and go a little bit lower. So, it really depends on what you tend to do. We don't do such sharp shoulders usually. So, I'm going to go a little bit lower for mine and then, this next line is bringing in the body. This is, if you imagine that this line that comes in, it's usually a bit of a fold. So, I like working with rulers and certain parts but you also want it to still not look totally like a computer drawing. So, the point is you want some things to have some life and you have some free hand in it. So, I'm going to bring this in and bring it back just like I did in the quick sketch, and you want to mirror that over on this side, and then from here, going down a little bit, you want this overhang to be, because your sleeves going to come down here. So, you want to be able to show your sleeve. So, you want to go down far enough to be able to show off enough of the sleeve, spring this down, put a little life into it and follow that down straight. We want to go from the same spot over here and you can measure all that to be exact, but you're going to do all the check-ups later to be in the same, things are in the same place. So, you bring this down, you want to keep it straight, which I didn't do, but I will fix. The sleeves are usually a little bit longer. So, that's your basic body shape here. Then you bring down your sleeves. You can use a ruler if you want to go straight, but I like doing it by hand, but you want to stay as parallel as possible to the body. Bring it down a little bit of a life. Same on the other side. It's just very natural. You can measure everything but it's really just taking a look and seeing this just looks right. This is where the chests is. At this point, it's still super basic. Once you have the proportions of the shoulders which is the most important thing having kind of hangs off of that, if you look, everything's kind of straight, straight down. You can use this sloper for tops and jacket, sorry shirts and tops. Whatever you want to use it for. What I usually do is for shirts, I just make a photocopy of this like 10 percent smaller. So it just fits underneath an outerwear piece. I'm going to show you how to do this but for pant. 7. Creating Slopers for Pants: So, the basic proportions for a pant that you can start with is three-inches wide by seven-inches long. That's a little weird to draw they're not as intuitive as jackets are because pants don't lay as nicely. But you have little tricks to make that work. So, basically, this is your waistline, and so most pants you want to decide for this, like do you make senior pants, do you make wider pants, do you make sort of lower-crotch pants, very small rise pants, or we can start with something sort of in the middle to a little bit of a drop crotch. So, that's really your line. I would say from the top of the waist band, anything that's past like two, two and half inches, you can start creating, calling a drop crotch. Yeah. Two and three quarters on the sorts it's a little bit, you'll see in the drawing. Really exaggerated if you want. So the technical terms for the center seam, when you're drawing this or when you doing drafting, you have the CF, the center front, when you drawing from the front, and CB or center back when you're drawing from the back. You have SS which are the side seams, and you have the inseam. I mean that's the way most pants are constructed. You have a front panel for the right leg, front panel for the left leg, back panel on both sides as well. It's pretty simple. Here are the crotch you want to create some separation from leg to leg, so you should do a little bit of an arc, and this is important to kind of get right because the hardest part is sort of like how you lay the pants down that kind of on top of each other. If you draw it like that, it looks like a skirt. It just doesn't work. So you need some separation here. You can bring it back in if you want. Just going to start with the right leg and start with the outside and kind of create the shape. This is sort of our standard five-pocket skinny. Kind of go straight down and then we curve it a little bit. All right? Then from the inside, you're basically now creating the real shape of it, the width of it. So, the further you come into here, the skinnier it gets. So you really want to see sort of what kind of a leg you want. So that's a pretty good leg shape. Because it's curving in, it's going to be a little bit shorter on the inside and the outside. This is a little bit of a strange shape here, and I'm going to fix that. You want that to begin as kind of a smooth line, and now what you can do is start bringing in those sort of breaking lines. So you just you pull this in a little bit, and then just have this continue. You pull it in. It just gives it this illusion of kind of a little bit of a fold. The little ones to bigger ones, but it helps give it some movement and just makes it look nicer. It also looks like it's floating a little bit more. You get really into these things that's kind of flats you can do and there's floats, and you like a sort of a hybrid of the two. I think it's because the floats are very curved and it's a way of drawing a flat that's much as like this this smooth but I think it's too much because it takes a proportion out of it, whereas with flat, they're just very technical. So, this I added just a little bit of movement to it, which makes it look kind of lighter and less straight, but you still get the proportions that you want. So i'm going to mirror this on the other side. You can if you want make a photocopy of this, and then turn the paper the other way around to trace it, to really get it exactly the same on both sides. I've done that for the first ones but this one I'm just going to try to get as close to this one as possible for sake of time. So, these are called searching lines. These little sort of very soft strokes and you want to try to keep those as soft as possible. I always loved that my drawing teacher told me that there's a sort of the the real beauty of drawing, a time they call it pentimenti, and it's searching lines. You often see it when people are designing or doing drawings. They kind of draw things longer, and these things will be left over once you kind of go over it. It just depends on the style. But those you want to make sure are really light because if they're too heavy, after you erase them, it kind of gets a little bit messy. Not the end of the world, but that's the beautiful thing about drawing with a pencil. I mean nothing's permanent,. You're layering up, you're taking your time, but you're really choosing where to kind of make your statements. I want to get to detail but there you have your really basic pant shape. You can do anything on this. You can take it out if you want to bell-bottom. You can go up here if you want the job pants. You can pull it up if you want more of a sort of a tight fit in the crotch. You can drop a joint here if you want like the harem pants. You can do anything from this. Once you have the jacket and shirt sloper and the pants sloper, you're started and you're ready to start putting your designs on it 8. Drawing Technical Flat Jackets: So, what we're doing here is, it's combining the proportions of the sloper that we've created with all the details that we had on our quick sketch, and that's what makes that the technical drawing. So, we're designing, we're starting with the banded collar, or stand collar detail. So, in the back, from there, we're going to decide the proportions of how wide we want that to be. This point is very visual. Technical flat's it just needs to look right. It's look like the proportions that you want it to be. These collars, they're usually tilted a little bit just the shape of them, they go the wider at the base. This looks like a pretty good line to follow. We want to keep that as smooth as possible so this is a good tool to use. The center is always where it's going to be straight. But you're trying to figure out just a nice angle for that piece. So, this is pretty angle, so we want to go quite far into the curve. So, we want to follow that and then just reverse it, use the same placement of that on the other side. I never usually go all the way to the middle because you want to keep it straight. But they have a really nice smooth line, equal on each side. We want to see the distance that you end up. Drawing that's a quarter inch here. Let me go up a quarter inch here as well. Then, it's basically just connecting, trying to keep the same distance. Keeping these two lines parallel. Then, at the end, I'm giving it a little bit of a shape. So, instead of just going straight down, which is a little bit abrupt, I'm doing a stepped movement. Just gives a little bit of an interest to the shape. So, you have that bit there looking pretty good. You don't want to get too dark with your lines at this point because you're going to go back in and go over most of them in the end anyway. So, you have your center front line from the slope or underneath, and I'm going to go just a little bit of the collar and bring that down slightly. So, there you have the first sight of your collar without any details. So, as we go along, we're going to get more and more detail basically putting into the details step-by-step. As on the quick sketch, we're drawing this open to show the zipper is inside and how it looks underneath, the collar continues the regular way and then we can break it out and open it up. So, you just basically folding it with your drawing to open it up. I'm going to start moving over to the shoulders because we want to bring those in because that's what's going to really determine to see the proportions of how big this part is going to be and where everything lands. It's a good time to bring in the body. I'm taking it straight off my sloper because I'm happy with that shape. If you want to create bigger sleeves, straighter shoulders, this is where you'll be doing that. So, the next thing is to put in the proportions of where the rib spacing is. I'm going to bring this up a little bit, just a little bit long. So, I'm going to start the rib from there. This is all like just looking at proportions and seeing what looks right to you. I'm going to be doing three quarters of, it's three eighths of an edge for the rib. Remember to bring it in at an angle as well. Now, we basically have taken all the important stuff off of the sloper. Now, it just becomes distracting. You can take it off and use a sloper next time you start something. You want to bring in the center line. That's one of the things that I did not trace but should have. I'm going to start with this very soft center line. There it is. Now, we have diagonal line coming across, which is the main design feature coming in. So, it's important you going to have that on both sides that line coming in. So, you don't want to be too narrow. You don't want to be too wide. Where do you start? At the top. You can really work this out on this. You can change it a lot. I'm going off my sketch like the way that looks. It looks like that's in the center, the buttons, so you want to go a little bit off. So, I'm going to start here, make a point. Where do I want that to end? If we have the center here, it's definitely off center, and we'll go right around here. So, that's the line. It's about five eights off the center. We'll do the same on the other side. You want to keep everything symmetric. You just have to take all the measurements from one side and then apply them to the other. So, you want to put in this panel. You'll see about that width. I think that as a panel is to wide but you're going to have the zipper there. It's important to keep sharpening your pencil because you want to get a lot of details in there. So, just like in our drawing, we're going to bring that front panel back over again. Put this nice little swerve into it. You're going to be seeing the zipper up here. So, you have the zipper tape. Next to the zipper tape, you're going to have this stitch line. So, that's the top stitching that I'm doing. Then, we're going to do little teeth. When you find that something's getting too small and too delicate, you can do a little circle and then do a bubble and just do it like a zoom in of that. Once you have all that in place, you go and you add the pockets. The thing about these drawings is, it's not measurements. It's about creating visual proportions that are correct to the way that you want it to look in the end. You have to remember that these pockets, they have to fit a human hand into it. So, in real life, that's six to seven inches in width, so you can approximate how wide that needs to be. For me, this pocket here is just under one and a half inches for your reference. You've seen I've added all of the top stitching into this already. I've also added the snaps. So, that's what the circle rulers is really nice for. You can try out the different sizes before on the side, and whatever feels like, that's the right size for the jacket that you want to do, that's the size that you are using, because for buttons and for snaps, you have many different options. So, usually the smaller it gets, the more feminine it looks. If you use a little bit bigger, it looks a little bit tougher. Once you get too really big, then it starts looking feminine again. So, you have to be aware of that choice. If you're putting in the snaps for the pockets, it's nice if it lines up with the snap that's going up for the frontal closure. You see, I've put in the rib. Like I said, it's just straight line, it's going down. I've put in all the top stitching. I've put in the snap details. I've put in the rib. I have decided to put some rib inside of the collar. So, I put that there. The zipper is there, so that's clearly visible, and this is in terms of the pencil part. I finished the front view of this garment that I wanted to make. 9. Drawing Technical Flat Pants: All right, so I'm going to teach you how to do the same thing we just did, but for the pants. You have your sloper, that we made earlier. Basically, you take the outline or change it however you want, in terms of the shape, I've taken the same one. Pants, usually there's not as much detail in them, so they don't take quite as long. But you have your center front opening, this is a five-pocket skinny jean that we do. You have this top section for the fly front pant, which is very typical for denim, right? So, two lines of the top stitching. You have your rivets, which are very important for denim. You have this coin pocket, that's why it's called a five-pocket. You have a tack button, which is that kind of button you have on the denim, that middle button. Those are really all the details except for the belt loops that you have. So, that's very simple. It's really about the shape in denim and then sort of the denim that you do, and the washes that you do, but of course you can play around and do whatever you want. Very simple. Mainly, top stitching and then a couple of details with different kind of buttons. So, this is the back of the pant. There it gets a little bit more complicated because you have to put in the pockets. These kind of pockets are called patch pockets as we learned earlier, because they're patched on from the outside. This part is called a yolk, it's a piece that most denim has in the back. There's usually a slight angle from the center back to the side seams, and you'll notice that the belt loops are different than the back. So, you have one at center back and you have one that are almost at the side seam but usually slightly back. In the front, you only have two and they're usually close to where the pocket begins. See here, and here. Top sections on the waistband, along the rise and then we're going to have some around the the pockets as well. So for pocket shape, there's tons of different pocket shapes that you can do for a denim, for any kind of pant, really. You can do the kind of step pocket that comes to a point, this is very typical if polyphenols and most of the genes. Then, there's some kind of stitching going on. I think it was wrangler genes that has this kind of- more like a- I don't know what you call the shape. It's another one. Somewhere just square but whatever you think is cool. So, you want to make sure that you have sort of equal distance from the center back, proportions are nice, this is a lot of kind of just working around and kind of figuring out its weird. Somehow, pocket on the backup pants are hard to get the proportions right. It's the kind of thing that I'm goig be teaching about the layouts. Afterwards, you probably want to do this in a layout to see it in real size, but this looks pretty good. Then, we can translate that over to the other side. I can show you a little trick which might be helpful if you want to transfer something. Just take another piece of vellum. So, you really like that shape of the pocket, just mark corners, all the points, flip it, to mirror it, bring those points over, and then you're gonna have exactly the same shape on the other side that we have. We can do it just with measuring too, but this can be with more complicated things too, and it really helps to keep things symmetric. Then it's about adding details on our denim. We have another piece that goes here and denim is great for top stitching. The more top stitching on denim, the cooler it looks. The top stitching takes a little bit of time but it's very important for the drawing. We do on our denim is we do two lines of top stitching on left pocket. That's kind of our signature. That's the back of our jean. Okay. Just to get everybody caught up again, we have the sort of three steps that we've learned, we have the quick sketching, then we created the sloper, and this is the finished flat technical. So as you can see, they're not always exactly the same. This is really where you're working it out. Here, was mainly me putting down as idea. Most of the ideas that I had here are translated into these, but if I've added pockets, I've added another band down here, so things have changed a little bit but that always happened. That's really normal, and that's kind of what this is for, figuring out all the details, like putting in the rib in the back of the collar as well. What are we going to do in lesson four? Okay. So in lesson four, we're gonna learn is really to make this finishing this drawing and making it kind of pop. So, we're going to be adding a darker outline and we're going to be using markers to make this even look more three-dimensional. 10. Adding Color: In this lesson, we're going to be learning basically two techniques. One is very simple, it's using a doll pencil to make heavy outline around the joint. That just gives it a another dimension, sets it off from the page. It's just a little trick to make it look a little bit nicer. The second thing is working with markers. A very basic way you don't need to be using a drawing. We're just basically filling in. You can use this one just to add some dimension or two if you have different fabrics or different color, combos, within one drawing, that's a nice way to show that to the pattern maker like this leave is this fabric, the body is in different fabric, so you just use different tones of the gray. I've taken the final flat technical sketch and I photocopy. I've reduced it a bit. It doesn't need to be this big when you're sending it, so it still has all the details and now actually sometimes by producing something it makes it look a little bit crisper. You also want to have another pencil, not a sharp one but kind of a doll one so you can just break off the edge and make sure it's a bit doller and then what we're starting off with is a dark outline with this pencil. So, if you don't feel so comfortable, you can just use a ruler. You are basically holding it at the edge of the drawing, edge line, using this kind of a heavier line for the outside. Continue all the way around the drawing. For some reason it just makes the more delicate lines look more delicate. The heavier lines more grounding. The reason that the photocopy is nice because none of this smudges anymore, it's all kind of set and if you mess up the marker you can just make a photocopy of this guy and start over and you can do different versions like, okay, let's see what it looks like with a different fabric on the sleeves, let's look at with different colors, it's a nice way of trying things out. But that's an outline. It just makes it pop off the page more not to go in with the markers. It's very simple. I think for this guy we're going to just show you and do a different sleeve fabric. So, imagine if the body was like a cotton canvas and the sleeves wear leather markers usually have a fat end and the skinny end. So this is more for the details, and this all has to do with your own comfort in it. If you get really good at it you feel quite comfortable when using the big one even in the smaller parts but let's start with a small one. The key to marker is to kind of just continue your stroke. You're continuously blending everything so if you do make a line and then you wait and then you make another line, then you can usually see that there's two lines on top of each other, but if you continue the movement it looks much better. We're going to go with W5. So, you just continuing the movement. See. That looks like you've just filled it with something. You can't really see the lines and that's quite beautiful. When you have a bigger piece like this, and then this is where you have to be more careful, it would take forever to use a little guy so you want to go with a little wider you can start with a point in the more delicate. It's working my way down. Leaves a little bit too so you don't want to go on the line, you want to stay inside of the darker line. This one you get a little bit of overlap and actually it looks cool, but this was pretty smooth. I'm going to show the body. It always helps to break it into the original parts that are there. So, instead of trying to do this whole front panel, I'll do this part and then I'll do this part and it just breaks into smaller pieces and it'll allow you to kind of continue that movement without going nuts. I can use the side of that for the bigger pieces that are really wide enough. The main reason that I'm using just grayscale is because this isn't about color choice at this point it's about showing the pattern maker that you're using different colors, using different fabric combinations or whatever it is. Later on, you're going to have swatches with the different colors that you're using attached to the packet but then they can say okay, this dark gray is A, the light gray is B. Gray option one is red and blue, option two is green and yellow, whatever. This is more for as a communication tool with the pattern maker. Which parts of the garment are combo A and which parts of the garment are combo B or combo C and D. The big part of the reason why I still do this is because I love all the things that happen, I love all the little smudges, I love all the little imperfections. It makes it look like something that a human created and that's sort of the beauty of this style of drawing. Something that happens in the photocopying process, it picks up the smudges a little bit, then using a marker on top of the folded photocopied bits, it changes things a little bit and it just makes look a little bit more handmade or organic or human. Now it's basically mark addin, you have done the three different sort of combos with a sleeve in leather, the body in the cotton canvas and then we have the rib on the bottom. I need to add the rib in here as well because you want that to be the same. So now it's very clear to see what part of the garment is what material and then you just do a little thing on the signs saying that this is A, this is B, this C and that's your finished flat technical drawing. So I wanted to show you a little bit of my past work, how it kind of comes together. These are just a couple of my sketches. I can't show you the new collection obviously but this is winter 13 and it's just a couple of the pieces. Once you start drawing many of them you put them together and what I do from this point, I make photocopies and I cut them out and then I use them in my design boards or the fabric boards. When you're really putting the collection together you can just take it off, put double stick tape and put it on the other end or it doesn't work in this fabric that's put it with the other group. It's a really nice way of organizing your collection and we have sort of a merchandising board, we can move them around and just make sure that the collection is well balanced and each fabric has enough styles and all of those things. The next step is to photocopy it again, cut it out and then organize your collection with it. 11. The Full Scale Layout: So this last bit, which is an extra for the eager students to do, it's just something I wanted to explain because part of the process for some of the more complicated garments, it's the full-scale layout that we do, and this is when it really comes down to measurements. So, if you want to make a jacket, I suggest taking a jacket that you really like that you feel like it fits well. It's well proportioned and I'm just going to quickly teach you how to do the measurements, what are the main measurements. So for jackets, we have the body length and this point here is called high point shoulder. The top part of the shoulder before the collar begins, everybody calls it HPS, but it's high point shoulder. It's what it stands for, and then to measure the length you go a straight line down to the hem. So, that's 27 and a half inches. So you probably just want to write that in here. 27 and a half inches. So this has nothing to do with the details of the garment, it's just the shaping. The chest measurement is taken usually, one inch, two point five centimeters below the armhole. So you want to go down one inch and you measure from side seam to side seam. This is a side seam here. The center front, side seam. Going down one inch, and across. So that is 20 and a half inches. Then you want the width at hem, which is across here. Make sure everything is nice and folded. That is 19 and three quarters. Then you want the measurement across shoulder, shoulder to shoulder. [inaudible]. This point to that point, 17. Now a couple about the neck, the neck width you always take at this top point. High point shoulder to high point shoulder. That's seven. You want the neck drop at center front or it's from here to here, that is yes. That's a four and three quarters. This one's a little hard to measure. It's a shoulder drop you want to basically continue this line straight and then see from here to here, that's the shoulder drop you call. That's that angle, and that is- one, two, to that seam, up to there. It's basically two inches. Now for the armhole. Armhole depth, which is measuring down from here to there. That is- let's go across like that, nine and three quarters. Then the armhole width. It's basically from here to here. So, it's that other measurement that's- one, two, three inches. Those are the basic most important measurements. So the reason that we're taking these measurements is to apply them to our layout that we're going to be making, and we don't have to make them from scratch. We take them from something that you know already fits well and something that you like. Okay. So I'm then going to show you how to apply the measurements that we took on the jacket, onto this layout. You start with a center seam as always. Centerline which runs here. And from that, you want to start with the neckline. So you want to look at the neck width, which is one, two, three, four, fifth one down, and we had seven inches. So we do three and a half each direction. Right, here's the center. One, two, three and a half, one, two, three and a half. So now we've got that width and we've got the high point shoulder. So HPS is right here. That's an important point because the next thing we're going to do is the body length, which is, we measure the body length from high point shoulders 27 and a half. That's why you need this big ruler and you end up here. Then you draw a line straight across. You have your body length already marked out. Okay. So, now I've applied the measurements to the paper. We have the basically- I mean we have the outline of the garment, but now it's in true measurements to a real garment and it's life-size. So this is where it gets really interesting because now you can start plopping in the details like you had it on your sketch on the flat and see if it actually looks nice and you can work with the proportions, you can put in the pocket, and you'd see does my hand actually fit in it. Oh yeah, it fits nicely. Maybe it's a little bit too big, maybe it's a little bit too small, we can easily make the adjustments here. But this is really important for when you want to work something out with details and proportions and you don't want to leave it up to the pattern maker. Because you're in control here at this point. You can decide, is that width a nice width for the band collar. No, it's a little too narrow, let's make it a little bit wider, and then you send this to the pattern maker and they know exactly what you want. Do you do it for every garment? No, it's not necessary for everything. But if you have a more detailed piece where the details of the proportions are really important, then this is a really nice thing to do. Like these angles here, for instance, right? They could be totally off. If they met here, it's not going to look nearly as nice. If they're too wide then you can't really see the angle, but you don't really know that so well from the sketch, you can really tell when you see it in life-size. That's why I recommend doing this once in a while. I do them for most of the really important pieces in the collection. 12. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: