Fashion drawing tutorial

You may have some ideas of fashionable clothes or certain costumes but not know how to sketch these. This article provides some tips and tricks on quick and easy sketching of fashion designs.
Fashion sketching does require some drawing skills and techniques to show texture, pleats, stitches, etc. However, if you have lots of ideas regarding fashion clothes or certain costume designs but don't know how to sketch, then there are some easy tricks with which you can learn some basic techniques. For this, you will need some basic sketching material like pencils, normal plain papers, tracing paper, croquis template, and an eraser.

Sketching for Fashion Clothes
The first and most important step is to learn how to draw croquis. A croquis is a simple sketch of a fashion figure which you need to use as a base. Using this, you can draw any kind of fashion clothing that you have in mind.
You can draw a simple basic croquis sketch on a paper which has grids. Grids will provide you better reference points to draw the basic model sketch. So, draw a simple male or female sketch with simple lines and forms, without adding any details like facial features or fingers/toes details.
If you have limited drawing skills, then you can find various free croquis model sketches online. Select a few simple poses like front, profile, and back poses. You can use these as a base for your fashion drawings.
Designers use these croquis as a template to trace when they are drawing fashion sketches. You can also keep these as a base for your sketches by keeping a few printouts of the same. On top of this, place a tracing paper. A tracing paper is an opaque, smooth paper which allows you to see the sketch placed under it. If you don't have a tracing paper, then you can also use a light box, which will allow you to see the base layer of croquis.
Draw the clothes you have in your mind. Make sure you keep the sketch simple. Use simple, flowing lines and simple pencil techniques to detail the texture, zips, stitches, buttons, embroidery, etc.
Given below are some tips to help you represent the designs properly in your sketches.
For the seams, draw using a solid line, while the top stitching should be shown using dotted lines. For the zippers also, use dotted lines, but for drawing invisible zippers, you need to draw a zipper pull.
To add texture and movement to your drawing, add pleats, folds, and patterns in your design. For pleats and folds, you need to draw slightly darker and shorter strokes than the rest of the seam. You can also add uneven lines to show fullness and gathers. You will also need to take care while drawing patterns, as they need to follow the shape of the garment.
You can show the inside of the garment as well. To do this, you need to do a little bit of pencil shading to show that the underside is dark. You can also add a back view thumbnail near the main sketch you have created.
Use the above steps and tips on fashion drawing techniques, and get a good croquis model as a base for your fashion sketches to create successful patterns.