Fashion Illustrators! 5 Tips How To Draw Quicker
When people think of an artist, they picture someone at an easel, palette in hand, spending hours pacing to and from the canvas perfecting that single brush stroke that ties everything together.
That’s a luxury rarely afforded to us in the fashion illustration biz.
Drawing quick is something that pops up often for us fashion illustrators, whether it’s because your drawing a fast moving runway show, jotting a clients ideas down quickly before they disappear or illustrating live at an event.
Fashion illustration is synonymous with fluidity and speed.
And that’s what I’ve always loved about it, I’m not the most patient person, so spending months reworking the same oil painting is my idea of hell.
So for all of you who are either impatient like me, or wanting to quicken the pace of your illustrations, I wanted to put together a few tips on how to do that, these are based around illustrating live at events but most of them are universal for any kind of setting!
Choose your focus
Not every drawing has to tick every box. I love my crazy fashion poses, but if the sitter is wearing a full body floral print, then I’m not going to do a crazy pose plus render a whole body of florals, it’s about choosing your battles.
The main boxes I like to tick are pose, pattern, texture and likeness. I won’t bother so much with facial likeness if their outfit is complicated or unique, whereas if their outfit is boring I’ll spend more time on likeness or the pose to make a more interesting drawing, don’t feel like you need to tackle everything every time, limit your focus!
2. Spend less time on the sketch
Don’t waste your time sketching out someones lips, fingers, toes, hair, earrings, outfit all perfectly, only to then go over the exact same lines with ink, it wastes so much time essentially drawing the same thing twice.
Just put a very rough pencil stage down, it’s a skill you can work up to, so now I just need basically a stick figure in pencil for placement then I go straight in with ink. But try and simplify the pencil stage as much as possible, it’s the stage that no-one ends up seeing anyway.
Use pencils for placement, planning and bare necessities, save the actual drawing for the inking stage, otherwise you’re just repeating yourself.
3. Think 2 steps ahead
Whilst I’m drawing the face I’m not thinking ‘ohh that’s the eye finished, now the lips, and now we’re drawing the hair’ I’m thinking ‘after this I’ll grab a 0.1mm to ink the outfit, then rub out the pencil lines so lemme find that eraser, then I’ll use a black brush pen to do the fur.’ You always need to know what your next move is to minimise time faffing.
I don’t wait until I’ve finished pencilling and inking before I start thinking how am I going to tackle this print, my brains working on that whilst I’m drawing the face.
When you do illustration and live events long enough a lot of things are muscle memory and you can do them without thinking. So faces, simpler poses, skin tones, proportions, they are instinctive, I don’t need to think whilst doing it.
Therefore it lets my mind be able to problem solve things whilst I’m drawing, so by the time I’ve gotten to drawing the tartan dress, my brains already figured out the method I’m going to colour it with.
4. Know your materials
This is in line with what I said about being 2 steps ahead, when I’m drawing the face, I’m not thinking ‘ohh lips, ear, now the neck’ I’m thinking ‘ok I need to grab Dusky Pink for the skin tone, then it’s Cocoa for the hair and Rose Pink for the lips’.
After a while you have such a familiarity with your materials that you know what colour you need automatically, if you’re not at that stage yet, have a page next to you of labelled swatches so you can just quickly colour match.
Nothing slows you down more than trialing 5 colours to get the right tone.
5. Think confident thoughts
The narrative we repeat to ourselves in our head whilst drawing does impact what we do.
I notice as soon as I make one mistake, and my minds going ‘oh look at that, you nearly ruined the drawing, you’re probably gonna mess up again, should I just start it again? oh we’re gonna mess this up, oh there we go, she’s got 3 fingers’.
Mindset can play a bigger part in live event illustration than you realise, nothing can slow you down as an illustrator more than self doubt. There’s a performance element to live event illustration, when a singer hits a bad note or a dancer misses a step, if they let that effect them and get in their own head the rest of the performance will probably be rough.
I’ve noticed at events when self doubt creeps in, it’s a downward spiral and the work just gets worse and worse but there’s 3 hours left I just can’t wait to get home. But if I’m confident in my head, even if I’m faking it, I notice the drawings turn out better and I make less mistakes.
I’ve done events where I’ve just big upped myself the entire time in my head, ‘oh this is looking good, not bad! Ohh I like this pose, damnn you’re drawing well today’ just repeating these kind of things in my head and you don’t necessarily have to believe what you’re saying but you’ll still react better to it.
If you want more help on speeding up your illustrations have a look below to see what course can help you out:
Live Event Masterclass - This course is designed around finishing illustrations within 10 minutes, so every lesson, warm up, critique, exercise is all based around speeding you up! Only 3 spaces left
Drawing Masterclass - This course is chock-full of ways to improve your fashion illustrations and get you ready to illustrate more complex things like backgrounds, emotions, narratives and loosen up your work - Currently £100 off
Wedding Masterclass - This course is designed to broaden your horizons with illustrating bride, groom, couples, families, backgrounds, all within a smaller timeframe to suit illustrating on the day at someone’s wedding - Currently £100 off
