Watercolor Fashion Illustration for Beginner | Kiara Lee | Skillshare
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Watercolor Fashion Illustration for Beginner

teacher avatar Kiara Lee, Watercolor Artist & Fashion Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome

      1:03

    • 2.

      Supplies

      3:55

    • 3.

      Watercolor Techniques

      9:00

    • 4.

      Standing Pose

      4:57

    • 5.

      Face Map

      2:50

    • 6.

      Walking Pose

      8:23

    • 7.

      Final Project

      24:15

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About This Class

Hi everyone! Welcome to my first Skillshare class!

Have you ever wanting to illustration your favorite run way fashion but don't know where to begin? Wanting to try watercolor but thinking it's too hard? I will guide you through the entire process with step by step instructions. After this beginner friendly class, you will be able to begin your fashion illustration journey. Please share your final project with us, I would love to see them! Enjoy the process and happy painting, everybody!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Kiara Lee

Watercolor Artist & Fashion Illustrator

Teacher

Hi everyone! 

Painting and drawing people has been the motivation behind my work. I have never yet found anything more addictive and challenging than trying to capture the complex beauty of the human figure.

Hi my name is Kiara, I'm a self taught fashion illustrator with the graphic design background. I'm proud to be a self taught artist, in fact I think all artists are self taught because even though we take classes from others we are the one who has to do the work.

I think fashion is our daily life with attitude, it should be fun and enjoyable. I'm here to share this joy with you! I love to work with watercolor because I feel like it has a life of their own. I love the expressiveness and the fluidity of it. It's ha... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Welcome: Hi everyone. Have you ever wanting to illustrate fashion? But they'll know where to begin. Wanting to use watercolor, but thinking is too hard. In this lesson, I'll go over the supplies, the watercolor techniques. Then we will learn how to render the frontal view of the fashion finger. Going over the face details. And finally put the dress on the model and finish painting this final project from start to finish together. After this class, you will be able to begin your fashion illustration journey. Now without further ado, that's star, this beautiful project. 2. Supplies: Hello everyone. And let's lesson. We're going to go over the supplies together. I have to mechanical pencils here. One is 0.5 and the other is 0.3, both in the Tooby and lead, I use the 0.5 for the initial sketch and the 0.3 for details and precise line. The Tombow Mono eraser for erasing the details. A kneadable eraser, and a unipolar signal, white gel pen for highlights to watercolor brushes. I'm using the da Vinci B35 in size 37. I also have two jars of water here. One is for rinsing the brushes in-between colors. The other one, I'll keep it clean at all time. I'll show you why when we start to paint. Also Iraq to take excess water out of the brush. And I will also keep a paper towel in my hand while I'm painting. Now, let's talk about the watercolor. I'm using this analogy, a 24 professional watercolors set inside. I replaced some of the colors with my personal favorites and add up more colors from Holbein and Daniel Smith watercolors. You have never used watercolor before. I will suggest that you use whatever you have on hand. War I get the student grade watercolor to play with first after you tried it and decide you like it, then you invest on the professional-grade watercolors. I also prepared some gold watercolor. This is completely optional. So if you don't have the gold watercolor, you can use the gold postcard marker instead. However, if you don't have either of them, don't worry about it. You don't need to have them. Now let's talk about the watercolor paper. There are three different kinds of watercolor papers, hot pressed, which we are going to use in this class. Cold pressed and the rough, hot pressed watercolor paper has a very smooth surface. Cold pressed paper has some texture, and the rough, it's very textured. I normally use hot pressed or cold pressed paper, depends on my mood. In this class, I'll be using the arches nine by 12 hot pressed watercolor paper block. I have been using the Arches watercolor paper for a while now, I love their paper quality very much, but it is very expensive. However, I found this bow home watercolor paper block recently. It is also £140.100% cotton paper. The paper quality is very good and the price is very friendly. So if you're on a budget, I think this is a very good paper to get. And I'm sure you can find it on Amazon or any other art supply stores. Okay? These are all the supplies we are going to use in this class. Then next lesson, we are going to go over some basic watercolor techniques. See you there. 3. Watercolor Techniques: Hi everyone. Today we're going to talk about some basic watercolor techniques. First, let's wake up the watercolor cakes. I forgot to mention one supply in the previous lesson, which is the water bottle. I used to spray my watercolor cakes and let it sit for a little bit. What I'm going to do right now as to pick up the pigment and mixing it with clean water. The mixture is about 70% water and 30% paint. We need a lot of water and watercolor as the water that do the magic. Now, I will mix a different color. I'll do the same 7030 ratio. I have a piece of £140 Arches watercolor paper here and a piece of paper towel. The first technique I would like to go over as the backwash. I'll load my brush first and come over to the papers to create a layer with evil. I'm sure. You move your brush back and forth to create even color. You want it to be wet, but you don't want it to be too wet. Let blood your paper. The next one, I call it a while. It's wet on wet. Some people call it wet and wet. I will apply a layer of clean water first. Basically for watercolor, the paint will go where the water is. So if you use the water to create a boundary, the paint will only stay within the boundary. I don't know if you can see this, but I'm creating a box for my watercolor to go. I hope you can see the shine when I took the paper. Now, I'll pick on my first color and drop it in like when we were doing the flat wash. If you think you have too much water, you can dry your brush and gently picked up the water. Next, let's pick up the blue and drop it into the wet paint. Look at that first. Just like fireworks. This is the magic of watercolor. You can create beautiful texture with those techniques. Next is the graded wash. We want to create a smooth transition with two different colors. You want to start with flat wash or with green. And then you want to add a little bit of blue into the green, drop it into the bottom of the wet layer, overlapping it a little. Continued to pick them more blue and keep going until you complete the wash with just the blue. If you feel like you have too much water on your brush, you can use a paper towel to take the excess water out. Now we have the very smooth gradient wash. The next technique we're gonna go over as the blotting what Bosch and tissue paper That's create a flat wash. Water is very important in watercolor. When it's wet, you can create all kinds of magic to it. Before your watercolor dry completely. You will be able to lift it and correct some mistake. I'm using the thirsty brush to lift up the watercolor right now. You can see that I'm able to live there color pretty easily. I can also use the tissue to lift the color and create texture. Because I have my studio lights on right now. So the watercolor dry faster than I expected. I can't really looked at when it's dry, but no worry. I can drop in more paint. And then I can show you the lifting with a tissue. For this technique, you want to do it before the watercolor is dry. The next technique I want to show you as the bonding with water. So same thing. We'll create a flat wash. And now I'll drop in the clean water. And you can see that the clean water just push the pigment away and created this interesting texture. You can also use the tissue to dab it and make it more obvious. The next technique is the dry brush. The dry brush effect, or show more on the cold press paper, but we can still use it on the hot pressed paper. The key for Dr. Walsh is you don't want your brush to be too wet, so I will pick up the color and then block my brush on the paper towel. Then I'll use the belly of my brush to quickly do this. You see the beautiful texture right here. That's what we want. You can go back again to adjust how you like it. The tip is not going back to many times. Otherwise you will lose that lovely dry brush texture. The next one is glazing. We will create the first layer of watercolor and let it dry completely. And then we'll layer another color on top of it to create shadow or another color. So same thing. We will create a flat wash and wait for it to dry completely. Let me show you the final technique. While we wait. Soften the edge comes in very handy when we're painting the skin. So that's saying that you don't want to have the hard edge right here. We can use the clean water but not too wet and you come in white against the edge to soften the tip is not to go over it too many times. See how the edge, it's softer now, okay, and now this layer is dry. I can use the blue color to go on top of that. You see in the middle here, we created another color. These are all the basic watercolor techniques we'll be using in the class. Play with all of them as many times as you need. I know a lot of people think that watercolor as hard, but if you keep an open mind and play with this charming medium enough times, I'm sure you will be able to enjoy the magic of watercolor. We'll go over to fashion figure in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 4. Standing Pose: Hi everybody. We're going to talk about the standing pose into my head fashion figure today, from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, It's one hat. First, I will mark the distance from the head to the ankles, leaving some space on the top and the bottom, draw a vertical line down the middle. This is the balance line and also the central line for the front facing standing pose. Then I will have this do another half on the top portion here, and another half on the bottom portion. Do the same thing here, here, here, and here. You can use a ruler to help you, but I normally just eyeballing it. Now we have eight heads, will add another head for the fee later. That's star from the head. I will draw a circle first from the bottom of the circle to the chin. It's about half of the circle along our jaw to taper and wines like this with their jaw bone and then connect them to the chin. And then I'll draw the muscles connecting to the pit of the neck like a triangle like this. I'll mark the pit of the neck about 1 third of the second hat here is also our shoulder line, the width of the shoulder. It's about two heads wide, or also indicate the trapezius here. Now we draw the breast. The bottom of the second head is the middle of the breasts. The third head is at the waist. The width of the waste. It's a little bit smaller than the trapezius. The hip as a line with armpit. I'll use tiny marks to indicate them. Those landmarks don't need to be exact because some people might prefer a bigger waste or hip. So we can adjust as we go. Now. That's connect the upper torso now onto the lakes, the bottom of the knee or at the six headline, that's indicate the bottom of the torso. Then connect the inner thigh to the need for health, or go out a little bit and then taper it and to connect to the ankle bone. Do the same on the other side. Okay. That's jaw, the feet, the inside as longer than the outside because our big toes are the longest. That's connected. The neck, shoulder, and the arm. Elbow is at the waistline. And breast, It's located around the end of the torso. Fingers are at about the middle of the thigh. Now do the same on the other side. I'll show you how to draw fashion fingers when we're doing our final project. Let me write down all the important landmarks of the body and we are all finished. I'll put the link to this drawing in the projects and resources area for you. We're going to talk about how to draw the fashion phase in the next lesson. See you there. 5. Face Map: Hello everyone. We're going to talk about the face Today. We are learning the night head figure in this lesson using live by 12 paper. So the face is now going to be too detailed, but it's still important to know how to construct a basic frontal face. So first, let's draw, or so-called and a vertical line down the middle, the distance of half a circle as the distance from the bottom of the circle to the chin. I'll draw to taper inward. Like this. You will stop at, around midway between the bottom of the circle to the chin. I will then draw two lines to connect them at about 45-degree angle, halfway from the top of the head to the chin as where our eyes are. Our inner corner of the eye is lower than the outer corner. I used a slightly curved line to show that there should be a one-eyed of the distance in-between the two eyes. And about half of the distance on each side. We'll draw two lines to indicate the eyes are eyeball as a circle. But because it is covered by the eyelid, so we will only draw half of the circle that's not close the shape of our bottom eyelids, the start of our eyebrow has a 30 degree angle to the inner corner of our eye, like this. The bottom of our nose. It's about at the bottom of the circle. The side of our nose is aligned with the inner corner of the eye, the middle line of our lives as halfway between the bottom of the nose and the chin, the corner. Our lives are aligned with. The inner side of the iris is right underneath our nose as the philtrum, I'll use a tiny bees to indicate that. Now we'll draw the middle line of our lips and jaw. The shadow of the lower lip. Don't online the entire shape or use watercolor to finish it. Yours start at the eye and the ear lobe is aligned with the bottom of the nose. The muscles of our neck, alignment with the outer corners of the eyes. The hairline is a little bit down from the top of our head and her hair will be a little bit higher than the top of our head. Okay. Now we are done. I will put this finished drawing in the resource area for you. We will talk about the walking pose and the next lesson. See you in the next one. 6. Walking Pose: Hi everybody. In this video, we are going to go over it, a walking pose, and we will also address our model to save time. I already finished drawing the face. The way we draw the walking pose is the same as standing pose. The differences are the central line will move along with our body. Also, when the model is watching, the shoulder would drop a little bit and the hip bone will naturally swinging up on her wayfaring signs, creating the contrapposto pose. The easy way to remember shortage down because I use this dotted line to show the Central Illinois action. Let me explain the difference between balanced and centered and balanced line. It's a straight line from the center of our head to the ground to ensure the model with jaw doesn't look like it's about to tip over. The center line is the middle of our body. It will move when we move to different places. Okay, now that's connected body from like as the waves there. So we'll draw it on the balance sheet. The cow up the back leg, open lab with a knee a little bit because I'll for sure the length of the palms as the same as the middle finger. Now, that's dress. The upper part of the dress as tight. So we'll draw it close to the body. Draw the belt following the body control or jaw waiting at the bottom of the dress. Okay, now onto the flower on the belt, you can draw any kind of flowers you like. Now, let's finish the other arm. And for hair. That's what her shoe on. Erase all the unnecessary lines and we're all done. Your homework for this lesson is to redraw this watercolor paper using a light pressure because we don't want to damage the watercolor paper. I will put the link for this finished drawing in the resources area. We'll be painting in the next lesson. See you in the next one. 7. Final Project: Hi everyone. I'm excited to pink today. I finished my sketch on the arches and I buy 12 watercolor paper mark already. That's wake up our watercolor cakes first. All next, skin color first. Normally, if I have a reference picture, I'll mix the color based on the reference. In this lesson, I'm mixing the skin color based on my personal liking, basically in mixed yellow plus red plus a little bit of purple and plus a little bit of brown. Or adding some blue or green to change it up a bit. In the future classes, I will show you more skin tone recipes. Today. Let's use yellow ocher plus opera, pink plus a little bit of purple plus a little bit of warm sepia. I normally mixed more than I need. So I don't have to mix more and have their color difference problem. Rinse your brush after mixing the color. Testing it on a piece of watercolor paper, make sure you like the color before you put it on your drawing. Now, that's begin. We normally start from light to dark and watercolor. But since the face is quite small, we will start from the shadow. After I put down the color, I'll rinse the brush and soften the edge. Push the color to the other side. You can go over to here directly because their hair color is going to be darker than the skin tone. So we don't have to worry about it. Now onto the arms. Put down the color, rinse the brush and soften the edge. B might fall off the light and shadow. This part of the thigh as under the dress. So it will be darker. Let's go back to do the second layer. Emphasize on the eyes, bottom of the nose, philtrum, and eyebrows. Now, that's due to heroin. Use yellow ocher for the first layer. Remember to leave some whitespace. The inner part of the hair is darker than the outer part. This part is lighter, so I'll use the brush to remove some color. Now, I'm mixing some burnt sienna with a little bit of brown to do the second layer. Going back. What? Dark brown for the details. Okay, now the hair is done. I'll switch to my size seven round brush because we are going to paint the dress now. Makes sure to mix a lot of blue and green. Because we are painting the much bigger area. I'll use the wet on wet for the upper body. That's put a layer of clean water first. Now, dropping the blue color on the shadow side. That's soften the edge a little bit because I don't want too much texture here. Now that's dropping the green. Make sure not to use the back-and-forth motion. Just drop the color. And gentlemen. Now, I will leave it to dry. Let's do the lower part of their dress while we wait. The light coming from the left side. So I put a layer of clean water. There was some wet on wet effect. I'll start from the right. I want to add some green here. So I lightly dab in some clean water and then drop the green color. Now I'm mixing a darker blue for the shadow part of the dress. Be careful not to touch the skin part. Now, let's do a second layer on the upper body and add shadow under the breast. Now, let's paint the piece on the back of her shoulder. I'm using the dry brush technique here. That's move on to the shoe. That's pink to Belt Green. Add a shadow on the shoe. Now, that's used the color of the hair to add another layer on the eyebrows and eyes. Also add the same color on the bridge of the nose and bottom of the nose. Use the skin color plus a little bit of the paint to paint the left upper lip as darker than the bottom left. I use the blue color on the iris. And then I'll use Payne's gray for the pupils and eyebrows. Add a second layer on the list. That's paying the flower. Now. I'll use the green and the metal. And then I'll soften the color. Be aware of the light source, and leave the whitespace. I use two brushes too, because I have ACR. So the watercolor dries faster than I like. I kept one brush with clean water at all times to help me soften the edges. Using blue right now. You can use any color you like for the dress and flower. The way you apply the watercolor is the same. Now, I'm going to use the gold watercolor for the veins of the flower. You don't have to do this if you don't feel like it. I'll put the goal color in the middle too. That's add some dark brown in the middle of the list for shadow. Now, we'll add a shadow on the ground using the wet on wet technique. I'm using paints grade for this. And a little bit of green because the color of the shoe has green. Normally, I'll use watercolor for the blush, but today I'll use pastel instead. You can use watercolor for this step. If you don't have this, they'll just use the wet on wet technique and also soften the edge. Apply the pastel on the cheekbone gently, and also the same color on the body. So the whole painting looks harmonious. Last, that's used a white gel pen for the highlights of the eyes. And we're all finished. Thank you so much for taking this class with me. I hope you enjoy it. Happy painting everyone.