Fashion Illustration: Digital Drawing with Attitude

1. Introduction: My name is Danielle Meder, I'm a fashion artist and writer, author of the book Draw Fashion Now. I have been live sketching at international fashion weeks in London, Paris, and New York for the past nine years. Today, I'm going to share with you how to do fashion illustration from beginning to end, drafting, gesture, dressing the figure, and an outfit of your own design and I'm going to do a demonstration of how I do a live runway sketch out a fashion show. The tools that I'm going to be using today, the iPad Pro by Apple and the Apple Pencil. I'm also going to be using as an application, Paper by FiftyThree, and their hardware, Pencil by FiftyThree. However, even if you don't have an iPad, you can use another tablet and you can even use just a plain sheet of paper and an ordinary pencil. As a special gift for you, I'm sharing some templates from my book, Draw Fashion Now. So, these templates will allow you to step into the drawing process at any point at which you feel comfortable. If you need some guidance with the drafting, then those lines are there for you, or if all you want to do is take a finished drawing and dress it up like a paper doll, you can do that too. Even if an illustration is not completely sound technically or there is a wrong line here or there or the proportions and slightly off, as long as the illustration conveys a sense of attitude, if there's a real sense of energy, and emotion that the viewer can see in the illustration, I would consider that to be a successful work. I hope by exploring the principles of proportion and gesture will give you more confidence to create your own fashion illustrations. Once we do the first drawing today and first drawing is always the most difficult, it'll inspire you to do a lot more. 2. My Approach to Fashion Illustration: So, a fashion illustration isn't just a drawing of a person wearing clothes. In order to make an illustration be a fashion illustration, it has to convey the attitude of the times. It has to be contemporary. So, attitude is everything in fashion illustration. If all you have in the illustration is attitude and no clothes at all, it's still a fashion illustration. Fashion illustration, and especially fashion illustration that's performed live at a fashion show, I see it as something that's very similar to dancing. You are absorbing stimulus through your senses and spontaneously performing that. So, I find it very helpful to think of illustration as being a form of dancing. So, like dance, it's a spontaneous expression of what's coming from inside of you. So, a successful illustration will have that same quality. It's something that's coming from inside of you. This sounds a little bit airy fairy, but I absolutely mean it, that an investigation through doing illustration, discovering your own style, and developing the ideas that are coming from inside of you will help you discover who you are and applies to pretty much every aspect of life. Because fashion illustration is always of its time, there's a tendency for it to become dated very quickly. This shouldn't bother you. It's just the nature of the thing. There's also movements in fashion illustration that happen as a matter of course. So fashion illustration tends to run from being very tight and very highly rendered, to being very loose and very sketchily rendered. Depending on what time we happen to be in, it'll be one or the other. Right now, we're in a very sketchily rendered period of time. However, we're already seeing movement back towards more hyper real, more exigent types of drawing. Fashion illustration is something of an anachronism since photography has really supplanted a lot of the practical uses that it had earlier in the 20th century. However, there's a real interest now in the performance and the process of illustration. It's been said that we're living in a dramaturgical age. People are very interested in how things are made and that's why you're watching this video, and I think that might indicate that a future Golden Age of fashion illustration might be coming down the pipe with you. 3. Digital Tools: Touch screens have been designed to respond to a fingertip. It's actually the moisture in your finger that conducts the electricity that allows the touchscreen to respond to your touch. That's why early styluses and including the pencil by 53 have a tip that's the same size as the finger, and there's a little metal bit under the tip that allows the electrical charge to conduct through. There's a lot of advantages to using the pencil by 53 mostly that its a three in one tool, so you can use the tip to draw a fine. You can use the side of the flat edge to draw a broad, and then you can flip it over and use the back end to erase. So it's awesome. You're basically holding three tools in one in your hand, and actually, if you're using the program paper by 53, you are holding four tools in one hand because your finger will allow you to smudge your work. So that's the huge advantage of using this tool by 53 with the program, the software that 53 created as well. More recent styluses like the Apple pencil have a much finer tip. The way that they've made this work is because there's actually a device inside the pencil that shoots the charge out at the screen. The great advantage of that is that especially if you're drying very fine details, those details are not being obscured by the tip of the stylus. So this is a much easier tool to use if you're doing something that is very detailed. The downside of it is that it takes a lot of battery for it to shoot that electrical charge at the end. So the apple pencils battery runs out a lot quicker, and you have to charge it a lot more often. So my preferences as a professional artist are to use the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. It just gives me the most control and the most detail. However, I really love to use pencil by 53 for coloring because it allows you so much variety as I just discussed in terms of line width and smudging and the eraser tool are all in one hand. So they both have their advantages and disadvantages. You can feel free to use whatever tools you're most comfortable with, and as I said, the instructions are also applicable to traditional analog tools as well. 4. Starting Your Figure Draft: We're going to start today with going step-by-step through how to draft a fashion figure walking directly towards you. We're going to cover how to make sure all of your proportions are correct and we're going to discuss investing your figure with a sense of attitude by using a gesture line. There's a gift for you I have created a set of six templates which have the illustration process at various steps in the process. So, this will allow you to step in whether you want to step in at the beginning or the middle or the end. Feel free to use these templates to create your own works of art in any way that you see fit. When you use these templates, you can open one up and you'll press the little dot button in the corner and then duplicate it and that means that you'll still have a blank template to go back to in case you need it. So, we are creating a fashion illustration from scratch. So, open up your program paper by 53 on your iPad or whatever program or tool you're using a piece of paper. If you're using paper on the iPad, you're going to click on the little squiggly line and that is going to open up a blank sheet for us to draw on. The first step that we're going to do is to draw a vertical line down the center of the page and the best way to do that is using this little pen tool that has a ruler attached to it. The ruler tool will automatically make your crooked lines straight. So, using a grey color because we are doing a draft, simply draw a line down the center and as you can see, the ruler tool corrects it into a perfectly straight line. So, since we're doing a draft we're going to be using a pencil. So, click on the pencil tool and we will continue doing the draft. The first thing to do is to place your figure on the page. So, you're going to mark a mark at the top and at the bottom of the figure. Make sure that you leave a little bit of margin outside of it as well so that your figure has space to breathe on the page. So, you have mark the top and the bottom of your figure, now draw a mark in the center to divide that section in half and then divide each of those sections in half again and then divide each of those sections in half again. So, as you can see what we've created is we have a line here that has been divided into eight equal sections. This is what's known as an eight head high figure. So, each section obviously represents the height of a head a head shape is an egg shape so the top section is where we're going to put the head because that makes the most sense. So, draw a little egg shape in the top section that's going to stand for your head. The next line that we're going to draw is a non-representational line. It doesn't indicate any body part or anything. Instead it indicates the action and the flow of the figure. So, we're going to be sketching a model as she's walking towards us on the runway. So, this particular line is going to capture the flow of her gesture as she steps towards us. It's actually going to run through her body and out the front foot if you can picture that and I encourage you to. So, in order to draw the gesture line, shake out your arm because you want it to be loose, you want it to be confident, you want to have this gesture imbued with the same sense of stylishness that you see in a model who knows how to walk down the runway. Then you're going to just draw a swooping line from the neck right down to the bottom of the page. If that first line for some reason doesn't feel right and it is just a feeling this is not something that can be objectively be correct or incorrect. Go ahead and just do as many as it takes until you feel like you have that flow, you have that gesture. So, these are the first three steps to creating a draft and as you can see, I've created the equivalent template that you can use if you want to jump in at this stage. If you are using the templates, I would suggest clicking on the three little dots in the corner and duplicating the template. So, if you ever need to return to a blank template, you've got it. The next step that we're going to do is the spine. So, this figure is walking towards us. So, all of the weight is on the foot that is coming towards us. This particular stance is known as contrapposto which is an art History term meaning that all of the weight of the figure is on one leg. Because all of the weight of the figure is on one leg that means that the spine is actually going in the opposite direction of the gesture line. So, we're going to draw a line in the three sections from the center of the figure to the neck. There are two main parts to the figure that have bone structures. There's the hips and then there is the shoulders and the rib-cage and in between there's a soft spot which where all the action happens obviously. So, we're going to draw two square trapezoid shapes for these two sections of the body. Make sure that these shapes are centered on the spine, so there's an equal amount of the shape on either side of the spine. So, we're going to draw the shape for the shoulders and the ribs that is going to be right here centered around the third tick from the top. Then we're going to draw another shape for the hips that will be in the fourth section from the top. We're going to draw the breasts because this is a female figure. It's very important that the breasts are parallel with the shoulders otherwise they look crazy. So, we're going to draw a line at the third mark from the top that is parallel with the shoulders and then we're going to draw two circles equidistant on either side of the spine to stand for the breasts. Now we're going to draw the hands and the feet. So, it's very important to make sure that the figure doesn't look like she's falling over that the front foot, the foot on which all of the weight is on is directly under the head. So, it has to be along at the center line and because she's wearing high heels, this foot shape is going to extend a little bit below the bottom line. So, draw that foot. Since the other foot is going to be behind her, remember she's walking towards us so the other foot is further away from us and behind us and she's lifting it at the same time which means that it's going to be a little bit higher than the other one. So, you're going to draw the other foot shape right there. The important thing to remember about the hands is that they are also going to be parallel with the shoulders. Her hands are just going to be hanging down. They are also parallel with the shoulders and they fall right around the center marker of the figure, so right around where the crouch is. So, you can draw if you want a little guideline to help you place the hands that way and they're going to be under the shoulder so you're just going to draw a little square shape like a little bit of finger area for the hands. Next, we're going to draw a guideline to guide the knees. This line is going to be parallel with the hips and it's going to fall about halfway between the third section from the bottom. So, you're going to see me draw this line right there. That's going to help us guide the knees. So, one knee is going to be here and the other knee is going to be here. Now we're going to connect everything together. So, to draw the bones of the arms and the legs. So, we're going to draw a line from the hip to the top knee and a line. As you can see, this one follows the gesture line because it's the front leg and it's walking towards us. Then you're going to connect the other knee to the hip and then we're going to connect the other knee to the ankle and just jog it a little. That jog just reminds us that there's going to be a bit of foreshortening there so that'll become clear later. Now we're going to draw the arms and just using a very quick gesture because the arms are going to be hanging down from the figure, connect the shoulder to the wrists. As you can see, I messed up but I just drew another line and went right ahead, so you can do that too. So, now we've connected the shoulders to the ankles. Now we're going to flesh out the legs a little bit to add muscles to help us guide the shape of the legs when we draw the outline. So, what we're going to do is we're going to draw little cocktail sausage shapes. We're going to draw larger sausages for the thighs and just draw those around the lines that you drew for the thigh bones and then we're going to draw smaller ovals that are going to represent the calf muscles and just make sure that these ovals are a little bit closer to the knee than they are to the ankle. What you'll also see is that on the far leg, this oval is a little bit shorter and as I said that's because this part of the leg is moving away from us so it's for shortened. At this point, I have drawn you up to this draft which is part of the template section. So, if you want to jump in at this point, feel free to use the template draft that I've provided. So, if you've done your draft correctly, it should be a mess and it'll be a bunch of shapes and lines. These shapes and lines are going to help guide the line art that we're going to do in the next step, but for now why don't you upload the progress and the draft that you have so far and I'm going to discuss how you can check your draft to make sure that all the proportions are correct. 5. Checking Your Proportions: I'm going to talk a little boat about contrapposto which is very important for fashion illustration, especially when you're drawing female figures. Because a fashion illustration isn't just somebody standing straight wearing clothes, no. A fashion figure has to have attitude. One way that we convey attitude is through contrapposto. This is boring, fashion, boring, fashion. Essentially, contrapposto is when the entire weight of the figure is on one leg. I'm going to do that again and I want you to watch very closely what happens to my hips and shoulders. So, here it is, all of my weight is going on to one leg. You'll see what happens here is that this hip, my right hip drops and my left hip is higher while my left shoulder drops and my right shoulder is higher. Why does this happen? This happens because when I shift all of the weight onto one leg, the shoulders have to compensate in order to keep me from falling over. So, I've talked a lot about contrapposto in terms of female figures. Contrapposto exists in male figures as well, but for male figures that have a particularly masculine affect, it's not as pronounced. So, a female figure can have some pretty wild extreme contrapposto, but you wouldn't see the same pose in a masculine presenting male figure. This is what contrapposto is all about and you can see that there's two major parts to the figure that are bones, that have bones There's the hip bones and then there's the ribs and the shoulders as I discussed, and it's the soft bit in the middle that makes contrapposto work and happen. This is where all of the fluidity and flexibility of the figure exists. So, what you need to understand for contrappposto is that when one hip goes up the other shoulder goes down. When you're watching a model walk down the runway towards you, essentially what you're seeing is contrappoosto shifting back and forth in motion. If you can picture me walking here, you can see that my shoulders and my hips are moving in opposite directions. Essentially, that's what you need to understand about contrapposto. One of the great things about doing fashion illustration is that you can always use your own body as a reference, and you can use your own body to help check your proportions, or you can use my body to help you check proportions. So, I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks for how you can make sure that your proportions look right. If you're looking at your fashion illustration and something about it looks a little off or looks a little wrong, these are the things you can check. The most important thing to remember in fashion in illustration as in life is that the crotch is the center of everything. What I mean by that is this is the center of the figure. The length from the crotch to the floor, to the bottom of the feet, should be equal as the length from the crotch to the top of the head. So, you can make sure that these two lengths are equal and that will go a long way to helping your figure look correct. So, it's very important to check with your limbs to make sure that the forearm is equal to the upperarm. Make sure that these are the same length and the same for the legs, the calf and the thigh should be the same length. The size of the hand, and you can check this on yourself as well, the size of the hand is just large enough that it can cover the face. Elbows are lined with the belly button and the hands fall at crotch level. The other important thing is to make sure that various things are parallel with the shoulders. Shoulders, the line of the shoulders, is going to be parallel with the line of the breasts and that means that, for instance, if I'm contrapposto and one shoulder is higher than the other, that breast is going to be higher on the high shoulder side. The other thing to keep in mind is that the level of the elbows is also parallel with the shoulders and the level of the wrists is also parallel with the shoulder. As you can observe here when I go into contrapposto, this wrist is lower because the shoulder is lower. This elbow is lower because the shoulder is lower. It's super important to make sure that the spine is going through the center of the body. So, when you draw the trapezoids for the shoulders and for the hips, make sure that there's an equal amount of the shape on each side of the spine. So, when we are illustrating this female water model as she's walking towards us, what you want to remember is that the weight bearing leg, the calf is longer and the foot is shorter and the far leg, the calf is shorter and the foot is longer. So, when all of the weight of the figure is on one leg, you'll notice this is very important that the head is actually aligned directly on top of the weight bearing foot. So, when you're drawing your figure, make sure that center line goes all the way through from the weight bearing foot up to the bottom of the chin, so that your figure appears balanced and sturdy. 6. Fleshing Out Your Figure Draft: Now we're going to draw the outline of the figure using all of these squares and lines as a guide. We're going to select the narrow pen tool to do this, and make sure that you've selected on your palette the black color. It's simply a matter of using lines because this is a female figure, we want to make sure that the lines are really elegant and curving and the curvings that you have is really going to come out in the lines. So, really enjoy drawing these feminine curves, and you can follow along using the shapes to help guide you. Wherever there is a joint, you're going to notice that the limb is going to narrow slightly. So, make sure as you're drawing that you narrow a little bit at the knee, you're going to narrow little bit at the ankle. If you ever don't like a line, if there's a line that's bothering you, you can erase it and because the draft is an underlay beneath, you don't need to worry about also erasing the draft. The figure is going to be narrower at the waist and a little wider through the hips, and you'll notice that when we draw the leg that is facing away from the figure, it appears shorter and this is because the leg is angled away from us. It's called foreshortening. So, when you're ready to do the face, we're going to zoom in. As you can see, when you zoom in, you just hold your two fingers like that close together and then pull out like so. So, now, we're going to really quickly draft the face. The important thing to remember about the face is that the eyes are in the center of the skull. So, there's an equal amount of space between the eye and the top of the skull, and the eye and the tip of the chin. You'll also want to make sure that the eyes are equidistant on either side of the center line. So, you can just draw in your eyes and draw on some eyebrows. The tip of the nose is halfway between the eyes and the tip of the chin, and you can just draw a little line that indicates the shadow under the nose. The opening of the mouth is halfway between the tip of the nose and the tip of the chin, and you can draw a line to indicate the opening of the mouth. I like to draw another little line just beneath that suggests the shadow under the lower lip. Anybody who wears glasses will remember that the tops of the ears are aligned with the eyes. So, you can draw ears on either side of the figure, on either side of the skull like so. Then, it's just a matter of connecting the rest of the skull around this egg shape which was the first part of our draft. Then, once we have all of that in place, and feel free to take your time and refine these lines until they're just as beautiful as you want them to be, we will have a crow key. So, now we have all of the outlines of the figure drawn and the face and everything, and we have all of these draft lines visible underneath on the underlay. Now, if you're just using a regular piece of old-fashioned paper, all you have to do is get rid of the paper underneath and you'll have the lines on top. If you're using paper by 53, here's how we get rid of the draft lines. Click on the little camera icon, and then you're going to click on the little trash bin icon. Where did it go? No, don't worry. Don't worry. It's fine. Click on the little squiggle icon, and there you have it. This is our crow key. This is the final templates. So, if you want to use the template that I've created for you for the next step, feel free to do that, and what we're going to do next is we're going to give the figure hair, color in the skin, and dress it in an outfit of our own design. 7. Coloring Tools: Now, we have the croquis and the croquis we are using as an underlay. So, if you remember what we did before, we saved it as an image and then we dropped it into the background of our canvas so we can use it as a tool to trace over top of. That way, when we erase stuff, we're not erasing the croquis. We're going to be using all of these wonderful tools provided for us by FiftyThree's paper. So, we have a Color Mixing tool. So if you tap on this little spiral looking thing here, you'll see that we have hue value and chroma, and you can select any color. Any color that you can imagine is here for you to use. If you have a color and you really like the color and you want to use it again and again, you can drop it into this palette. So, here you can see we have a number of different palette setup and if you want a new color in the palette, you just hold down so you can drag it over, and you can drop it into your palette just like that. So, now we're going to talk a little bit about the other tools that we have available to us. So, we're going to start by using the Pen tool. So, the Pen tool is really, it's the tool that has the most line variation so it's a very expressive tool. You can see as I go slow, it makes a thin line and when I go fast, it makes a thick line so this is speed sensitive as opposed to pressure sensitive. There's another way that we can get line variation with the Pencil by FiftyThree. So, if you use the tip of the pencil, it's going to be about this thick, but if you use the long edge of the pencil, you get a much thicker line. So, if you need to fill in a lot of space very quickly, you can use the side of the pencil, and then if you need to erase, you can just flip the pencil over and you'll erase just like that. The final tool is like on your hand itself. If you use your finger, you can smudge the edges of anything that you're working on. The really cool thing about the Pencil by FiftyThree is that it's actually four tools in one. So, we've used the Pencil tool already and that's pretty straight forward so you know what that's all about, but when you are drawing with the Pencil by FiftyThree, you can also shade in with the edge and that gives you a different texture and a different flavor. This tool is a marker tool. Once again, you can vary the width of it and as you can see, it's slightly transparent but not too transparent. If you want a transparent tool, you can use the Brush tool which is the most transparent and it's meant to give a watercolor effect. So, if you're making a very beautiful floaty chiffon gown or something, you can definitely use this tool and it'll give you that look. If you keep going on top, you're going to get more and more saturation, so you can see like the more that I press in using this tool, the more variations in saturation I can create. 8. Designing Your Outfit: Since the croquis is an under layer, what we can do, we can draw and we can smudge in, and it's not going to smudge the lines of the croquis. So, if you want to color in the croquis, you want a color in the flesh tone of the croqui, for example, I've created a pallet of flesh tones that I like to use for this. So, to make a really nice flesh tone, I actually like to use the watercolor tool and then smudge the edges. What I would do is I would just put that color in an any part of the figure. You can erase parts that you don't need which is going to be shaded or shadowed. So, a little bit under the knee, on the underside of the arms, under the neck, and details of the collarbones as well. Then what you can do is you can take your finger and smudge that altogether so that these rough edges are smoothed out. You don't have to be too neat and tidy about this. So, if we zoom in to the face, then we can shade the face as well. So, a little bit here under the cheekbones, under the eyes. Let's say, we want to give her a little bit of lipstick as well, we can do that too. So, now we've colored in some flesh tone for our figure and we can add some hair if we want. I think for the hair, probably what makes the most sense is the pen tool. Remember, when you go fast, it's going to be thick and when you go thin, it's going to be thinner. We're going to start at the ends. Usually, we would start from the root of the hair, but we're going to start at the end of the hair, because if you start from the root and go to the end, then it gets thicker on the wrong side of the edge. Does that make sense? With the speed sensitivity, sometimes you have to think of things a little bit counter-intuitively. Then you can use your smudge tool to bring it in. So, another way to get that line variety and to get that point that we want is to reverse engineer it using the eraser tool. That's nice. I like that. See now I'm just getting playful. This is what drawing is actually like. You literally sit there and you're like, "I like this. I don't like this." So, I'm going to add some of the thin pen tool here too to sort of like give it the look I want. So, let's say we want to create a very solid colored dress. We can use the roller tool, and what that'll do is it'll make a shape that is completely solidly filled in. So, in this case if we want to make some pretty in pink convection, you can draw it like that. You just essentially, you draw the outline of the shape and it completely fills it in for you. We're going to draw a colored shirt and to make sure that the color goes believably around the neck of the figure, we're going to draw through the neck. So, I'm going to draw that line so it goes outside like that, and then I'm going to draw the opening of the shirt itself. I'm going to connect these lines up. So, you can see here this is a super light draft, but I'm just going to use this to guide the lines that I'm going to draw in a bit. The front of the shirt goes down the center front of the figure. So, we can use the belly button here to help guide us. This is the shirt pocket, will go down like that. It's just going to be just below the elbows. So, I'm going to make sure that I draw these lines curved. So, it appears to go believably around the figure. The shirt doesn't look like it's sitting in front of the figure. It has to look like it's going around the figure, so that she's believably wearing it. There's going to be little bits of compression. So, I'm just going to draw little zig zaggy lines at the elbows. That gives a sense that her elbows are loose and relaxed since she's not holding her arms super straight. So, that's going to be the outline of the shirt. Now, I know where all of the parts of the shirt are. I can go in and I can draw the line art using the pen, but only the parts of the lines that are going to be seen. So, obviously we're not going to draw the collar that's behind her neck because her neck is blocking that view. So, there's the collar, there's the pocket of the shirt. You want to leave some space outside of the figure because this is not a skin tight garment. I'm jogging it a little bit at the elbows here because like I said, I want to make it seem like she's relaxed, and that she's pushed up her sleeves. There's where her belt is going to be. So, now we've drawn the outline of the shirt. If we want to color it in, say with a nice light blue, we can do that. I'm going to use the watercolor tool to fill in the color of the shirt. So, as you can see, I'm just coloring in over top to give that blue color to where the shirt is. Wherever I want shading, I'm going to go over it again. It's a little bit of shading under the breast here. It's going to be a little bit of compression here, little bit of shading under the collar. Anywhere I want, I can just blend that a little. Great. So, now she's wearing a shirt, super. So, now she's going to be wearing a really full skirt with a lot of gathers and there's going to be a lot of these wonderful little curlicues at the hems. I'm going to show you how to do that. So, once again, we're going to use the pen tool to draw that. I'm going to take a nice dark blue color to draw the outline of the skirt for you guys. So, the important thing to remember is that the hem of the skirt is actually parallel with the waist band. So, if I just use the pencil tool to very quickly draw like this is the waist band of the skirt, that's where the hem of the skirt is going to be. Does that make sense? There we go. So, we're going make sure that the hem is a little bit higher on the high hip side. Then we're going to use the pen tool, and we are going to just draw lots of little curlicues like that, all around like that. So, once we have the curlicues, we're going to connect the edges of the curlicues up to the waist band. Any edge of the curlicue is going to go right up to the waist band. Since it's a transparent skirt, we're not going to worry about erasing the bits you can't see. But if you were doing an opaque screen, you would erase the backs of the curlicues as well. Where it's gathered into the waist band, I usually add some more little loops and stuff too because that's a lot of fabric. There's a lot going in to there. So, essentially this is a very fairyful skirt, and we can color it in using the watercolor tool. What I would do is just because there's multiple layers here, I would add these stripes to show that some parts of the skirt you're seeing, more than one layer. We're going to add some little shoes for her. I'm just using the pen tool to do that, and I've zoomed in to allow me to do the detail a little better. There you have it. We have illustrated a figure and dressed her up and given her hair and the whole deal. I hope that if you've followed me all the way through to the end, you have something similar but not exactly like this. That would be great. I hope that this lesson has allowed you the opportunity to feel more confident about the principles of proportion, the idea of gesture, and if you're using an iPad, it helps you to see the possibilities of using a program like Paper by FiftyThree. The most important thing when you're doing this type of work is to practice it. The first drawing is never the best drawing. You actually have to do many, many drawings until you start seeing progress develop and you start seeing your own style come through. So, I want to encourage you to be really proud of the fact that you've seen this one through. I really hope that you're excited to do a lot more because the more of them you do, the more beautiful they will be. 9. Outfit Tips: So, to talk a little bit about rendering an outfit on your figure, I thought that I would dress up in an outfit similar to what I'm going to be rendering on my figure. While I'm standing here, I'm just going to demonstrate a few principles to you that will help you dress your figure. Even if the outfit you design is a little bit different, these principles will apply. So, one thing to remember is that, wherever there is a bent arm or like a bent leg, there's going to be folds that appear on your garments. So, here you can see on my sleeve, when I bend this elbow, we have folds where things are compressed, and no folds on the side where the fabric is stretched out. So, that's one thing to remember about dressing your figures. Like anywhere, where there is a bend in the limb, folds are going to appear where the garment is compressed. Something else to remember, when you're drawing your figure. For instance, when you draw a collar, it's very important to draw the collar all the way around and through the neck, and then erase the part that is behind the collar. This will make the collar appear believably connected around the neck of the figure. Any closure on the garment. So, on a pair of jeans, the fly or on a button shirt like this one, the buttons go up the front. This line is aligned with the spine, it's aligned with the center of the figure. So, if the figure is standing in Contrapposto, you're going to see some compression and folds appear at the side of the figure where the garment is compressed. You're also going to see a very slight bend in the center front closure of the shirt. Any of the holes where the body is coming out of the garment, make sure that you draw those lines to be curved so they appear to be a believably going around the figure. Otherwise, if you draw these lines straight, it'll make it seem like the clothes are superimposed or hanging in front of the figure. So, in order for the figure to be believably dressed in the clothes, make sure that you make all of these edges round. As you can see, there's another trick to it. So, when I have my arm facing towards you, this curve will appear to go upwards. Whereas, if the arm is facing away from you, the curve will appear to go downwards. It's very important to remember that the hum of a skirt, unless the skirt is asymmetrical. If the skirt is symmetrical, the hum of the skirt will always be parallel with the waist of the skirt. Where you might get into trouble with this, is if instead of being at the natural waist, the waistband of the skirt is at the hips. In that case, the hum of the skirt will be parallel with the hips and not the waist. So, when you're dressing your figure and the garments that the figure's wearing are not skin tight, you'd need to make sure that there is some space between the outline of your figure and the outline of your garments. So, the reason why I'm wearing a tool skirt, is because it is transparent. So, that you can see all of the details of these lovely full, full folds. You can see through them like an X-ray. When we're drying a very full skirt, all of the fabric is gathered into the waist and as it flares out to the hum. You can see the hum, it creates all of these lovely little curly hues. So, when you were drying a skirt, that is this full, you actually draw the hum and the curly cues first, and then, you connect those edges up to the waistband. As you can see, everything is gathered up into the waist and it flares out towards the hum. At the hum, you have these lovely sort of like curly cue sort of folds. 10. Conclusion: Thank you so much for drawing with me today. I hope that we were able to clarify the principles of proportion in a way that gets you to be more confident about your illustration, and also really demystify this enigma of gesture and attitude, which is really going to bring your drawings to life. Every feeling that you have in this life, whether it's anger and frustration, or joy and triumph, all of these emotions will come through you, and if you allow them to express themselves naturally outside of you, onto the page, it's going to give your drawings character. This is just one drawing that we did today. I hope you do many, many more. You'll find that the more that you do, the more beautiful they will become, and the more satisfying this journey is for you. If you're interested in further instruction, I really want to encourage you to acquire my book, Draw Fashion Now. It's available everywhere books are sold, and it has lots of instructions like what we did today. But I talk about male figures, I talk about drawing from the side view and, there is also instructions on live sketching and touchscreen sketching in the book as well. So, thank you so much, again. Please upload your finished work into the project gallery and I'll check it out and give you my comments, and let's all draw fashion now. 11. Bonus: Watercolor Demo: So, I thought I'd give you a little bit of a window onto how I do live sketching at Fashion Week. This is the kit that I take with me. I sewed this up myself. So, it's a piece of Plexiglas and when I'm done the sketch, I can slide it in to show off what I just did. So, I like to use hot press watercolor paper, at least 140 pounds. One of the hardest one lessons from this particular practice is that I cannot economize on paper. You have to get the best paper you can use, and then you have to treat it like trash. So, this is my field kit. These are a bunch of half pans of watercolor, and I have a range of neutral colors as well as a range of bright colors. So, that gives me just about any option that I would need to do, any skin tone, hair color, and whatever the models are wearing at a fashion show. These are called water brush pens, they're by Pentel, and they allow me to carry water with me anywhere. You can see the water is in the handle of the pen. This way, you don't have to carry a container of water from you. It really allows you to do watercolor drying on the fly. I also tend to take with me some metallics, just in case there's any bling in the show. In case there's any highlights required, I use a water based white marker by Sharpie. It's very important to have tissues with me at all times in case I make any messes and bloopers that need to be blooped up. So, when I'm at the show, there's three steps that are involved. First of all, I'm listening to the music and I'm getting into the vibe. As I was talking about earlier, all of the stimulation of a fashion show is going through my eyes and out my arm. I am the camera in this case. In order to be able to render the emotion of the fashion show, I really need to be feeling it. So, what I start with is I start by just using like a very light color that is like a skin tone color and this is what I used to do, the draft of the figure. I don't have time to do a complex draft like what I demonstrated to you today. So instead, I collapsed all of those steps into a few brief lines. So, like a little circle for the head, blot it if it's a little too much. Sweep for the spine, for the leg, shoulders, arms, that's it. This is the draft. So, the next step of the draft is to drop in any colors that I'm going to use. So, if she's going to, I'm going to start with the hair in this case. That's it for the hair. Less is more, the more you overwork something the more pained it's going to look. So, you really want to do it just absolutely in a fashion that is almost careless, like you couldn't care less possibly. Next we are going to do. We're going to put in the color of the outfit. So, we're going to do a similar outfit to the other demonstrations, do like a really light blue for the shirt. Just drop that in, and like just you just dropping the color in. Just sort of like generally where it needs to be. Next, we're going to do the skirt. We're going to start with the waistband and then it's going to be the same thing that we did before like a very full skirt, so we're going to like do this doodley, doodley, doo, doodley, doodley, doo, for the leg. Connect that up to the hem, the skirt, very full and fun. Then, just fill that in just like that. Then maybe a little bit for the shoe too. So, once you have all of the color in and you have this draft in, it's going to give you the guidance that you need to do the final step which is to add the line art. So, I'm going to use black for the lines obviously and I think the most important thing. The thing that you need to be a little bit tighter on is the face, so that you can get the details just right. I like to start with the mouth, little bit for the nose, and add the eyes in. Just like that. So, as you can see, each step that I do kind of guides the next step. Then once the face is in place, then you can start getting a little bit freer and more expressive. You're going to mess up, it's just the reality you are going to mess up. But when you're doing this type of work, you have to embrace those messes. It's the idiosyncrasies that create the character of the drawing. A perfect drawing, the ice slides right off of it. You need to have the flaws in there to keep people interested. The biggest challenge with doing this type of work is knowing when you're done. Because as soon as you're done, you have to stop. That's it. That's how you do a live runway sketch. 12. 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