Before Starting
Texture
Whether you want to create simple or complicated fashion illustrations to represent your fashion designs, (or the outfits from the runway or magazines), texture helps you to represent the type of fabric and its features more accurately. Is it fluid, sheer, and light? Or is it stiff, solid, and heavy?
And, despite the level of detail, you can suggest the type of fabric just by adding a bit of texture. You don’t have to make the garments look extremely realistic to let people know what kind of fabric they’re made of.
For example, in the following image the material is implied by the color, but the texture reinforces that the jumpsuit’s material is denim.
Get Rid of the Flat Color
Today is the second part of the color process, you’re going to color the garments of you fashion illustration, and I’ll show how I do it.
To give texture to your fashion illustrations you can use different kinds of materials, and complement the features of some of them with the characteristics of others. So, with every new layer of color and details you build up the texture and make it look more AWESOME!
That’s exactly what I do; I complement the main material with other tools.
- I add a layer of color – with markers.
- Then a new layer of color in some places – with markers.
- Once the color base is done, I continue adding texture details – with other material, like brushpens, color pencils, fineliners, gelly pens, and/or ink pens.
- Then I add another layer of texture details, shadows, and hightlights – with a tool I haven’t used yet.
- And I do the same until the fabric texture looks like I want it to look.
You can see the videos to clarify the steps of the process.
But, what texture details should you draw?
This is the fun part. In the videos of this course, I show the step-by-step to draw the fabric textures, and I describe the kinds of details you can add to create them. But, you can follow this exercise to come up with your own texture details for the kind of fabric you want to color.
1 | Observe the fabrics from your source of inspiration.
If you can get the fabrics physically that would help a lot better. Observe the texture and each detail of the fabrics:
- How do they reflect light? Are they shiny or matte?
- How do they work with gravity? Are they fluid or heavy?
- How do they work with the body? Are they close or far from the body? Do you need to add some ease?
- What else can you see? Does it folds and gathers? Is it stiff?
- What little textures do you see on the fabrics surface? For example, in light jersey I see small dots and thin lines, so when I illustrate light jersey in a simple fashion illustration I always draw this kind of details.
2 | Determine how you want to translate your observations
Now it’s time to think about how you can represent all the observations you took note on the last step, for example:
- If they reflect lots of light, you may want to leave some white spaces, or use your white color pencil or gelly pen more heavily.
- If they are fluid fabrics, then you may want to add lots of gathering with your brushpens. And, on the other hand, if the fabrics are heavy you may want to leave the garment without any fold or crease.
- If they have folds and creases, you may want to emphasize them with an extra layer of color or with brushpens or with color pencils.
- For the little textures, will you go literal and realistic, or more abstract?
3 | Experiment and practice before
Once you have different ideas of how to represent your fabrics, practice on a scrap piece of paper.
Or if you want to see exactly how the textures are going to look on the garments, and how to improve with every round of practice, you can create more sketches of your fashion illustration and experiment on them.
Finally, here’s something I shared with one of you during the week via email, and I think it can be helpful to remember when we feel fearful or impatient 😉
“Each and every piece of work you create takes you to another level of proficiency and mastery. We can’t be perfect the first time, even less if we haven’t defined what’s perfect for us.”
Now on to the Videos!
Markers Basic Techniques
Fabric Texture with Markers