When designing your own clothing, sketching is the first step to take. Sketching expresses your design ideas onto paper and lets you visually represent what you’re trying to achieve before you move onto manipulating the fabric. Your sketches will help you and other people visualise how your garments will look like when worn, and may help you choose material. If you’re new to fashion, or just need to brush up on your fashion sketches, read on for a quick lesson and some useful tips to help get you started professionally.

1. Get some Fashion Figure Croquis
The first thing that needs to be drawn on paper to be able to visualise your clothing ideas is a croqui (sketch of the human form). But sketching a human form for every new design is very time-consuming. That’s why most fashion designers work with a library of fashion figure croquis. They use croquis as templates to trace over when drawing fashion sketches and illustrations for their design portfolios. This website allows you to download free printable fashion templates in a variety of genders, body types, styles, and poses, which you can edit to meet your personal design taste.

2. How to get your Croqui onto your sketchbook
Choose a croqui with a pose that matches the design in your head. To be able to trace over your templates you need to have translucent paper like tracing or lay-out paper. Trace the outline and major lines of the figure (you can use a pen or pencil) onto a sheet of tracing paper and add in facial features and hair styles if you like. Then put a sheet of carbon paper between your sketchbook and your tracing paper to draw the croqui onto your sketchbook.

3. Start sketching your design
Now the human form is on your sketchbook paper, the real fashion sketching can begin. This is the hardest part and it definitely needs some practise. You will need a B or 2B pencil for general sketching and a 4B pencil for putting in highlights and emphasis. Keep the 2B quite sharp and use the 4B to make the emphasis mark you like best. When you sketch your design it is very important to draw the folds of clothing and to illustrate the fabric in the best way possible. Different materials and techniques can be used to do this. Use different pencils to create different effects like Charcoal Pencils, Carbon Pencils or Watercolour Pencils. Also try to draw in lighting effect and shading depth as it will enhance the quality of the sketch and gives 3 dimensional illustrations. Use colours and the different techniques in reflecting the movements and the poses of the model.

Try out different croquis and experiment with different materials to work out your designs. With a little technique most people who insist they cannot draw can achieve a satisfactory fashion drawing. Good luck!

Watch the following videos for a step-by-step walk through for drawing a professional Fashion Sketch!

Part 1 – Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12

Material list

• Fashion figure croquis (to use as templates)
• Sketchbook
• B or 2B and 4B pencils
• Normal pen or pencil
• Colour pencils
• Soft eraser
• Materials to experiment, for example: Charcoal Pencils, Carbon Pencils or Watercolour Pencils

You can probably find all materials in your local art shop.

When you’re done, upload your drawings to the Thread Project gallery to get ratings and comments on your sketches!

Tags: croquis, designing, drawing, Fashion, fashion show