TAM 2480

Digital APPAREL AND TEXTILE PRESENTATION TECHNIQUES (FASHION ILLUSTRATION)

This course explores using software from Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat) specifically for apparel design and presentation. Students in this course will also critique and analyze visual communications of clothing design concepts.

 

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to: 

Develop the fashion figure (croquis) for communicating apparel design ideas using essential digital media 

  • Learn to use Photoshop brushes, patterns, and special effects to create professional-looking fashion croquis and illustrations

  • Learn to develop professional-quality fashion flats in Illustrator

Creatively interpret design inspiration into your original apparel designs

  • Analyze garment styles, garment construction, fabric drape 

    • Learn to reproduce these elements on the fashion croquis and evaluate using elements and principles of design

Develop a personal aesthetic (or hand) demonstrate it in both illustration and presentation techniques

  • Develop skills for stylized and effective visual communication of apparel design using concept boards, technical design procedures, and other presentation methods

We stress to students that this is not a figure drawing course. However, We highly recommend that they take a figure drawing course from the art department as one of your electives.

 

Final project

 
 
Fashion Illustration by TaNisha Tolbert (2018)

Fashion Illustration by TaNisha Tolbert (2018)

Here are examples of the final culminating project for this course. The final project incorporates all the techniques and concepts discussed and practiced throughout this course. Students choose a target market, and conduct research on the selected market in order to design a collection with five outfits or looks that have clear ties to the background research and inspiration that. The fashion illustrations were created in Adobe Photoshop and students also created front and back, black and white technical illustrations for each garment in the collection. Ingenuity and innovativeness of your garment designs were stressed.

In the fashion illustrations, students were also asked to include shading and and fabric textures. In this class, students are taught to apply existing fabrics by using scans or images of fabrics and warping the images to make them have a more realistic look.

 
 
 
 

Shading Garments

 
 

The focus of this project is realistic garment shading. Students were to design three original looks on croquis figures that they developed prior in the course. I asked the students to develop the croquis in full color including have skin tone, shading, faces, and hair. And, the garments were to be illustrated in gray-scale. Doing so, provided extra emphasis on shading and garment drape.

 
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Inspiration and concept board development

 
 

Below are exemplary examples of mood and inspiration board from students. This is the first assignment in the course and students are just being introduced to Adobe Photoshop.

The goal is to develop striking and inspirational looking boards using strong visual imagery and color. 

In addition to learning the mechanics of Photoshop, I also have three lectures about professional layout and font use.