Fashion Drawing

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a fashion drawing can be priceless: it is the medium in which clothing exists before it exists. Fashion designers create original clothing, accessories and footwear by first sketching designs, then selecting fabrics and patterns and giving instructions for production. Drawing — a picture or diagram made with pencil, pen or crayon rather than paint — is where that process begins, whether the instrument is a graphite pencil or a stylus.

Instruments, and Drawing Goes Digital

Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium: graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, paints, wax coloured pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, erasers, markers, styluses and various metals all belong to the kit. The modern question is whether the definition stretches to the computer — and in practice it already has. Digital drawing, the act of using a computer to draw, with CAD software among its tools, is now a standard part of design education and studio work, valued because a digital sketch can be recoloured, resized and shared in seconds.

The choice of medium shapes the drawing. Pencil and ink produce the expressive croquis used to sell an idea; technical drawing, covered in its own section linked below, produces the precise flat specifications a factory works from. A competent fashion artist moves between the two registers — seduction on one page, engineering on the next.

Fashion Illustration as a Profession

Fashion illustration is the communication of fashion that originates with illustration, drawing and painting, usually commissioned for reproduction in fashion magazines as part of an editorial feature, or for advertising and promoting fashion makers, boutiques and department stores. Fashion illustrators — also called fashion design artists — are specialised illustrators who express fashion designs and ideas through art; in modern times they often work with computer design software and usually hold bachelor's degrees in graphic design or a relevant field, though a degree is not an absolute necessity.

Fashion drawings are almost any illustration focused on fashion, accessories and related subjects: they tell stories about clothing, handbags, shoes and jewelry. Artists create them to be sold simply as art, and develop them for the industry, magazines, newspapers and public-relations materials; collections make fabulous coffee table books. Many of the most talented illustrators graduate from a fashion college, and readers who want to join them can continue to the fashion design schools summary, the artist guide and the fashion illustration summary linked below.