Wednesday, August 29, 2018

How to draw fashion figures - Faces



Fashion drawing unlike any other ‘realistic fine art genre’ is quite achievable as it does not demand to be very detail oriented. As long as you get your proportions right (which I will talk about in another blog soon) you can pretty much qualify as a fashion illustrator. Firstly one needs to understand the basic idea behind making fashion drawings. Primarily fashion drawings are done to depict your design ideas on paper so that before you actually make an effort to sew them you can have a fair enough idea how they are going to look. Hence the emphasis is more on the Garments fall, draping, the fabric used and the details rather than the details of the fashion figure itself. It’s not meant to be very realistic in terms of the body details but as far as garment goes you can be as realistic as you want to be. I have also seen illustrations that have real pieces of fabric.

One of the most challenging part of a figure drawing however is the face. You can still get away with body not being perfect or looking a bit disproportionate but faces have expressions, they need to look balanced and human (and not aliens!) 
Having said that faces too need not be very detailed, for example you can get away with not drawing eyes or facial features all together but do get the positions and poses of the face right. It should be in sync with the body pose. You cannot have head looking backward when body is facing front (unless you are working on Gothic collection!) 

In order to achieve accurate and appropriate position of the head and face the best technique that I followed when and I initially started drawing fashion figures was by keeping a medium size ball with lines drawn as half and quarter circle. Though human face isn’t perfectly round, it’s more like an oval shape but that elongation could be added later on. Once you master making these round shapes you could easily fill in the lower jaw part. 

Here are some of the potential shapes that you can make. Try to figure out as many positions by turning the ball. 

Once you are confident making these round circles with the lines starts adding the lower part of the face, which would be slightly longer, turning this round shape into an oval one. Try to keep eye level line, nose line, lip line and chine line parallel to each other.  

Let’s try few poses - 


Once you are happy with the shapes, one of the best way to practice them and get a hang of them is by highlighting them with a black  marker pen and tracing these figures as many times as possible. Very soon you will be drawing them without any difficulty. 

Like any other art form these too require a lot of patience and practice so do keep a note pad handy and soon you will get a hang of it. 


All the best !


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Have a happy sewing time!