Tag: creative life

Turning Your Fashion Illustration Passion into a Profitable Career

Being a fashion illustrator allows you to combine your artistic talents with your love for style and design. While it’s a highly competitive field, there is a huge demand for skilled fashion illustrators who can bring a designer’s vision to life. If you have a natural gift for rendering figures and capturing the essence of clothing, you may be able to turn your fashion illustration passion into a full-time career.

The first step is to master the technical skills required. This includes learning how to draw the human form and clothing accurately from various angles. You’ll need to understand how different fabrics drape and move on the body. Studying fashion design, color theory, and trend forecasting will help you create illustrations that resonate. It’s also crucial to develop your own unique illustration style through experimentation.

Once you’ve honed your skills, there are several avenues to explore for making a living as a fashion illustrator:

1) Freelancing for Fashion Houses and Designers
Many high-end fashion houses and designers hire freelance illustrators to bring their clothing concepts and collections to life through illustrations. As a freelancer, you can build a portfolio showcasing your ability to capture a brand’s aesthetic through your illustrations. Having this specialized experience can lead to ongoing freelance gigs or even a full-time position.

2) Working for Advertising Agencies and Magazines
Advertising agencies often need fashion illustrators to create conceptual illustrations for campaigns. Similarly, fashion magazines hire illustrators to provide illustrations for editorial features and advertisements. This type of work requires a versatile illustration style to bring different client visions to life.

3) Selling Products with Your Illustrations
Another option is to create your own product line featuring your unique illustration style. For example, you could design and sell apparel, accessories, home goods, and more featuring your fashion-inspired illustrations. E-commerce platforms like Etsy and your own website can help sell these products.

This is where I focus making money with fashion illustration. To have your own style and market that is key to this path. You can see more on this in my article here.

4) Teaching Fashion Illustration
If you love to share your knowledge, you could teach fashion illustration courses at local colleges, art schools, or online learning platforms. This allows you to pass on your skills while earning a living from your expertise.

No matter which path you choose, having an outstanding online portfolio showcasing your best fashion illustrations is key. Promote your work through social media and build a following to attract clients and customers. With dedication and perseverance, you can absolutely make a living doing what you love as a fashion illustrator.

One of my favorite fashion illustrators is

Holly Nichols be sure to check her out.

5 Tips You Need to Know When Beginning Fashion Illustration

5 Tips You Need to Know When Beginning Fashion Illustration

Introduction to the Basic Fashion Figure for Fashion Illustration

So you want to get started in Fashion Illustration? It looks pretty simple, you think you can do it, but you don’t know where to start? I’ve been doing this and learning a lot. So let’s discuss the five top tricks that have helped me out and can help get you ahead of the game.

Tip Number 1 – Create Movement with your Fashion Illustrations

You want to make sure your fashion figure pose isn’t stiff but has movement and flow. If you draw your fashion figure straight up and down it will come off as cold and robotic. Here are some of my very first fashion illustrations.

Fashion Illustration

I’m kind of embarrassed to show you these, but everyone has a starting point. This was mine. As you can see, they look stiff and the one on the right-hand side even looks like she is falling over slightly.

Here are some more recent sketches I’ve done with better movement:

So how do you create movement? On to tip number 2.

Tip 2 Study Fashion Magazines & Model Poses

You want to create movement. Angles, the body sways as you walk so you want to emulate that in your fashion sketches. Study fashion photos and see how the models are posing. Here are a few to give you an idea.

Follow the angles the model’s body makes and incorporate that into your drawings. Draw fashion illustrations of models walking the runway. The hips will go one way, while the shoulders go the other. I still have trouble getting this perfect, see my latest Instagram post for what I’m talking about.

Tip Number 3 – Have the Correct Materials

Trio blending copic markers

Having the correct materials can make your work 100 times easier. This one you can get away with not having the correct materials. However, I highly recommend investing in some good alcohol ink markers. The colors blend well when you are using them and create just the right blends you are wanting to create in clothing, hair, skin, etc. You can blend with watercolors and even the iPad pro. But, alcohol markers make it so easy!

Personally, I switch between the iPad pro procreate app and hand-drawn fashion illustrations with Copic markers. I started out with colored pencils and watercolors and started investing in copic markers. It took me six months to invest in them to get a good variety. The difference is huge. Just scroll through my instagram feed and you can see what a difference the materials seems to make.

Copic Markers, or really any alcohol ink markers, are super easy to blend and use. You don’t have to get a degree to use them. You can layer the lighter colors to make a darker shade or add a slightly different tone to create the folds and shades of the outfit. Yes, you can do this with watercolors but I have found that the watercolors were not as easy as a beginner as the copic markers are.

Tip Number 4 – Practicing, Practice, Practice

As with everything, you need to practice, practice, practice to get better. It still takes me several hours to complete a fashion illustration. You can do different practices to help your speed. I just haven’t invested the time in that yet. Since it takes me several hours to complete one, I usually only manage to do about 2 to 3 fashion illustrations a week. I am wanting to be able to do them quicker so I can do more in a week. I am just not there yet.

Still, doing 2 to 3 a week has gotten me a long way from my first to my latest. This is the difference from, my first, 7 months ago to yesterday:

 

Tip Number 5 – Study Other Peoples’ work

Studying other fashion illustrators’ works and components has been a huge help for me. Check out my post on my favorite fashion illustrators to follow on Instagram. I study different elements or features that they have in their drawings that I love most and try to recreate them in my own figures and fashion illustrations. Occasionally, the artists’ will even posts tips and tricks on what they do to create their illustrations. I always get excited to learn something new to help improve my work!

When I first started drawing fashion illustrations, I had a lot of difficulties drawing the eyes and other facial features. It took practicing and studying what others did to improve. I still have a long way to go. In the beginning, I loved sunglasses or glasses because I just could not draw the eyes to save my life!

Bonus Tip Number 6 – Take an online Fashion Illustration Class

There are a few places that you can take a quick fashion illustration class. Check out skillshare, youtube, or as I mentioned in tip number 5, Instagram stories. You never know what tip or trick will help improve your work the most! Also, don’t forget about pinterest as a huge resource. You can find fashion croquis to help you get started or different outfit ideas for incorporating into your fashion illustrations.

These are my top tips for learning and perfecting fashion illustration. There are so many other tips and tricks you can utilize. I’d love to hear some of your tips that have helped you the most. Comment on this post or get in touch with me via social media! I look forward to interacting and learning with you!

 

 

About Me

About Me

My Degrees

Canvas Acrylic Wall Art Painting of Shoes

I always knew that I wanted to do something creative and fun, and wanted something versatile for when I had children. So, after exploring things like writing and illustration, I set my sites on Graphic Design as a career path.

Flash forward to graduating college with a BS in Graphic Design, I hit the work place right as the economy took a tank in 2009. With scarcity in my job outlook, I decided to reinvent and balance out my education with a Masters in Marketing. I finished my degree while working full time first as a Graphic Designer then as a Project Manager, always maintaining a creative outlet in my work and personal life.

The Present

I finished my schooling and worked for a company handling their website advertising sales planning, i.e. media planning. I got married just over 4 years ago. My husband and I have a wonderful, bright-eyed and smiley baby boy.

What Lead Me Here

All that schooling and life experience has led

The Future

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams