Our assignment for our final was to draw and render a 6 look capsule collection, presented on presentation boards with fabric swatches. I chose to design jackets and coats, presented in front of a background photo of a blurred, colorful city street.
This project was my first exploration into designing garments and learning about different types of fabrics and their most effective applications. I never actually told my instructor I’m not studying anything to do with fashion, so I was terrified but ultimately pleased to receive such positive feedback from her regarding the designs, their renderings, and the fashion figures, themselves.
This course taught me the fundamental rules of drawing for fashion, which I learned I find ridiculous, but nonetheless, I feel like I gained a thorough enough understanding of them to allow me to thoughtfully break them in the future. I took this class after learning how much I enjoy drawing designers’ conceptual sketches to help them visually articulate their ideas in a way that they can’t manage to do on their own, but realizing I wasn’t able to do that when those sketches were of garments was incredibly frustrating and something I felt I needed to correct asap. I was hoping to no longer have this limitation after taking this class, and now that I’ve completed this final assignment, I feel like I no longer do. I have a lot to learn and to improve upon – drawing the fashion figure and fashion proportions still do not come easily to me, and I need to practice rendering specific fabrics to make them look more realistic and accurate – but I’m proud of this starting point. I’m interested to explore fashion illustration as opposed to primarily design sketching, going forward.
