I just don’t want to see anyone fooling themselves for as long as I did, please! My own 14 year old daughter is a string bean, genetics from her dad’s side of the family.īut to default to ridiculously long legs is what I call a “cheap route” to getting your sketch to “say fashion” instead of developing your art skills. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t tall or thin women and they need fashion designed for them just as much as anyone. When I researched my book The Language of Fashion Design over the past year, there were thousands of pictures from designers (and I’m talking LIVE RUNWAY PHOTOS, not even illustrations) that I refused to print just because the models were SO frighteningly thin. Adding two feet’s length to their legs and pulling every ounce of body fat off of the bones isn’t the first one that comes to mind! You can do a million things to make your drawings look better, and your design concepts more exciting and emotional, beautiful, textural, elegant, moody, evocative…. Scary, right? But its true that if you draw that way, then there’s your literal translation. These photos from a Brazilian modeling agency’s campaign (STAR MODELS) show the direct relationship between sketch and reality using Photoshop: Sketch on the left, corresponding human on the right. WHY on Earth would/should/could fashion proportions be any different in fashion drawing? This is a top concern in ethical fashion that effects all of the ways that women become disconnected within the fashion system. Or chairs, or tables, or stuffed animals, or packages, or dishes, or musical instruments, or ANYTHING in the world, we would draw them as proportionally accurately as possible under ANY circumstances. They were all real and true, living and breathing, carrying beautiful energy and imagination.ĭESIGNING CLOTHES, right? If we were designing cars, Well I’ve seen millions of beautiful women in my life ( actually I think they all are) and none of them were elongations nor exaggerations. I’m embarassed because they are so distorted, thin, and “elongated”… that’s the word we used. Now, I look back on piles of work I did when I was in school with beautiful design concepts, most of which I don’t want to share anymore. He only thing is, the weirder they looked, the more “acceptable” they were by my teachers. So there were all of these standards and proportional charts and things, and suddenly the models start looking really weird. Then I started studying Fashion Design and Illustration. We drew them as we saw them, adding our emotions or techniques into the mix to tell a story. And our Life Drawing classes, 6 hour nude model drawing studios, featured real human models. The first year, called a Foundation year, was only fine arts and art history. I spent four years at Parsons School of Design learning fashion. If you start with a super skinny fashion model drawing and THEN shade, watch OUT!….they get overly thin looking.Īlso, it’s hard to fit garment details like vertical seams, collars, and pockets all into the design sketch if the torso is overly narrow). ILLUSTRATORS NOTE: when shadows are added to “wide” drawings, they become quite narrow in appearance anyway. why shouldn’t you distort your bodies into super long and skinny? You can get deep into Model Drawing for fashion using “regular” and “plus size models” in my mind-blowing MODEL MAGIC online course, by the way. (my above sketches from SPFW A/W 2014 do not use exaggerated proportions. (Along with garment production, textile production, trade policies, ethics, and lifecycle maintenance of garments.) ETHICAL FASHION, baby!!! Oh, YES! The “standard from’ being taught and accepted in fashion sketching, designing and models mus become part of our sustainability conversation in Fashion. I had the honor of speaking at an ethical fashion event on this topic: Fashion Filter IN and out of my teaching at Parsons School of Fashion for 20 plus years, I insist on re-visiting the “standards” being taught of fashion proportions. Not only don’t I “believe” in them,I cringe at them. (above, live model drawing of a dancer/ fashion model Shaunna Gray from Parsons–with ink brush pen) So, fashion proportion gods, what’s UP?Īnd I have to break it to you up front, I don’t believe in “fashion proportions”. So an 8 head figure can be realistic or not, varying depending how wide you work it. But length of a heaad also has a ration relationship to width of the body. “8 heads”, “9 heads?” “10 heads, 12 heads? “( Length of the body in relation to the length of the head use traditionally to guage fashion bodies). STOP!!!! What’s UP with Fashion Proportions?
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