The finished vector camo fashion design illustration.
Using Adobe Illustrator for fashion design illustration can be a powerful tool to help visualize concepts for development and presentations. Mostly, we’ve been accustomed to view highly stylized sketches building on the technology’s inherent razor sharp gradient filled vectorized shapes. But using Illustrator’s Brush Tool experimenting with the Brush Library combined with your hand strokes replicates natural line drawing. Add the Wacom tablet and pen, and vector drawing can capture lines as natural as your personal signature.
View this tut as a broad overview instead of a detailed step by step. These concepts are the main points that I cover teaching and conducting professional seminars. I’m always impressed once students and seasoned fashion designers attend these demos, they quickly apply the methods.
Rendering patterns using the graphic apps, either Photoshop or Illustrator, give the ability to map patterns onto shapes or just filling with tiled designs can quickly give the impression. This ubiquitous approach I’ve used more than not, got me to reconsider as I quickly describe patterned garment shapes sketching from the fashion model in timed poses. The spontaneity suggesting the design can evoke more spirit than the literal interpretation.
Looking at the marker sketch below, I like the bold, less detailed expression of the patterned skirt and striped ribbed sweater. Using the same approach for Illustrator, I built upon an unfinished gesture from the NY Fashion Model Drawing Meetup that I organize and created a similar result.
But why use the computer for these gestural illustrations? For the same reasons to have the ability to edit, re-color, reconsider, fluidity creating presentations, and building a drawing with a myriad of mobile and sharing applications.
A marker quick sketch provided the inspiration for the vector style rendering.
The marker gesture sketch to the left is a good beginning to scan into Illustrator providing enough information describing the model’s movement while suggesting the silhouette.
The learning curve to get comfortable sketching in Illustrator becomes easier beginning with your drawing locked in a Template layer. Starting with your sketch helps to retain proportion and fluid line quality. As you become accustomed to either drawing with the Wacom tablet and pen or on occasion using the mouse to draw beautiful Beziér curves can mimic gestural lines.
The trick is to concentrate developing fluid lines depicting the movement. Sketching from the model, I prefer using marker to automatically simplify and graphically express line to a sketchy approach with pencil. Marker is a compatible translation to Illustrator’s vector object, flatly rendering colors and patterns.
Locking in the Template layer, create a new layer and begin to convert the marker gesture to vector lines. Some experienced users may already use Live Trace that can quickly convert scanned bitmap art into vector objects. Personally, I rather think of the conversion as re-drawing my original marker sketch and using Illustrator’s tools to retrace the movement. Lines that stop and start, unfinished, heavy and lighter line weights are all important attributes. Using, Live Trace while maybe the perfect choice to convert complicated textures for fills, the lines instead become shapes and challenging to edit.
As using natural media, drilling the sketch down to the fewest amount of lines but emphasizing the silhouette, creates a stronger finish.
Looking at the zoomed in view of the face in Outline mode, you can see that the character of the line weight in Preview mode is the choice of the Brush style building upon very simple paths.
Zoomed in view of face in Outline mode
Zoomed in view of face in Preview mode
The Blob Brush Tool is perfect to paint free form shapes. The brush reacts to pressure sensitivity if you’re using a tablet and pen. Another helpful feature is that you can continuously add to the shape without creating another object. As you would render with natural media, to SIMPLIFY the pattern and suggesting the movement on the body keeps the live gesture in the finished illustration.
As you render the different screens of the camo, consider to save individual colors in their own layer. This makes the selection and groupings if necessary easier.
Zoomed view in Preview mode
An easy method to create the shadows is to think of the darker areas as larger shapes and fill them with a neutral color. Experimenting with the opacity slider will preview the overlay effect blending with pattern. Again, to place these elements in a separate layer will make editing and selecting easy.
The stitching was created drawing paths using the pen tool and selecting dashed line from the Stroke pane. I used Round Cap and Join for a more graphic contrast to the free form style pattern rendering.
With the finished illustration the color story can be easily manipulated creating multiple color stories and layouts.
Have fun!
Fabuloso! Love the way you explain it so well and the work is gorgeous!
Forgot to shamelessly plug my blog….. :-/
geoffry, these r fantastic! i’m forwarding this one to my students.
Thank you my talented illustrator friends! Everyone should always check out your blogs: Spirit of Drawing and Mamie N Baby.
This is a very good post! Keep them comming!