Never stop dreaming

When we get to a certain age, we tend to feel shy about our deepest dreams... It would sound ridiculous for me to say now (at 33) that I want to be a ballerina. But that is what I used to say as a child, as many other girls I guess. I think the desire of being a ballerina is rather symbolic. Our intuition as little girls relate us to the values attached to it: grace, balance, harmony, beauty...

The decision of taking a fashion design course was not about me wanting to make clothes, sell them and make money. It was about dreaming and searching for my true self.

Never stop dreaming, and if you feel like there is something about you that you need to explore, do it. You never know where this will take you, but it will certainly be a better place.

My last piece of drawing (the pose was inspired by a painting). 

Learning to draw human bodies is not only useful for fashion design.

I have't said too much about the place where my introduction to design / drawing happened. 

It is the Dubai International Art Centre. 

Check their website, they have lots of new courses coming.

Our dear teacher Dyali, she is great and I can only hope that all the teachers are as good as her.

PS I didn't mention something so far: there were ten of us starting the course, only four actually finished. I was the only one who attended all the classes, and I am probably the only one who started to blog about it :)

Forth week of fashion design - getting into fabric details

Saturday's Fashion Design course was more like a practicing session, where we learned how to use the tracing paper and got to practice different poses. So another way to draw poses without thinking too much  is to copy from magazines on tracing paper (see below). After you copy the shape (try to guess where the body lines are behind the clothes), you can draw another similar one that is closer to a fashion figure (leaner and taller). Then you can draw your own clothes on it. I used the same figure to illustrate what we learned: lace and jeans. I wish I had a different shade of blue and some other colors. My next acquisition is some extra colored markers.

                          

So finally we learned how to draw the lace, however for a better rendering I would need to get a black fine pen of 0.1 (the one I used here is a 0.2 and it is a bit too thick). If the lace is transparent, draw first the skin color, if it has a lining draw the color of the lining first and then the pattern of the lace.

                                         

And finally, as i was supposed to be practicing satin and lace, I thought it would be a great idea to draw my favorite ever red gown. For shiny fabrics like satin, we show the shine of the fabric with white lines, as below.

Tutorials on fashion drawing - basic standing figure

While I was browsing around trying to find inspiration for this week's homework, I found some YouTube videos with fashion design / drawing lessons.

I leave you with this one, a tutorial on how to draw the basic standing figure, similar to what I draw in my first class. However, I find it much more complicated in the tutorial than in our class. But there are different learning and teaching styles out there, and these videos might be useful to understand the technique.

Enjoy and learn!

Basic Standing Figure Tutorial: Fashion Design Drawing Lesson by FashionARTVentures