Thursday’s Book Review:
Fashion Illustration for Designers
by Kathryn Hagen

Fashion Illustration for Designers

Rating
5 stars = Shiny!

Description
This is a book on how to draw fashion illustrations. It starts with the basics of figure drawing, then moves on to poses and adding various types of clothing. It includes chapters on men, children, and teenagers, and briefly touches on digital illustration and working with color.

Liked
With nearly 600 pages, this is a very thorough book! It even comes with a set of DVDs that feature demonstrations of various rendering techniques. The book is heavy, but it’s spiral bound, which makes it easy to refer to while you’re working.

Fashion Sketch

I like that it has sections on drawing hands and feet, arms and legs, and even hair. It shows how to draw flats (those basic line drawings you see on pattern envelopes) as well as three-dimensional posed fashion sketches. It illustrates techniques for drawing draped, gathered, and pleated fabric, as well as how to portray different types of fabric. Taffeta looks quite different from a slinky knit or bulky tweed, after all. It covers every type of garment, from pants to skirts, blouses to swimwear, sundresses to evening gowns.

Drawing Hair

It also teaches you how to draw men, along with children and teenagers, which is quite useful if you’re looking to get into the business of fashion illustration.

Children's Fashions

Disliked
There were a few typos and a few mislabeled illustrations, such as the 1860s couture hoop dress that’s marked as being from “The House of Worth, 1922”. In addition, ninety-five percent of the illustrations are in black and white. There’s only a small section that’s in color, near the end of the book. While I understand that color is expensive to print, when you’re talking about an art book, color is essential. As hefty as the price tag is on this book, you’d think they could have sprung for full-color illustrations throughout the book.

Full-Color Illustration

Conclusion
All in all, this is a great book to teach you about how to draw fashion illustration. It provides a solid base in figure sketching, along with specifics you won’t find elsewhere, such as how to draw various fabrics. I learned a great deal from it and I’d happily recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to draw their own fashions.

Buy Now: Fashion Illustration for Designers

(Yesterday’s Thimble is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Basically, this means if you click a link to an item that Amazon sells, and then buy it, I earn a small fee that helps support this website.)

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Do you have this book? What do you think of it? Did your drawing skills improve after reading it?