Drawing Fashion

Mr. Thames' step by step/how-to book is the best of it's kind...precisely because he doesn't have a flashy, flamboyant drawing style that upon close examination ends up being full of mistakes. There are plenty of clear lessons about drawing the female, male and children's fashion figures. The lessons on how to draw stylized hands, feet and multi-ethnic faces are easy to follow for any beginner. The best part of the book are the many step by step drawing instruction on garment details,fabric drape and textile prints.There's a wonderful section on fashion history using black silhouetted illustrations. The easy demos on using markers can help any beginner apply color to their fashion drawing with speed. Understandably,the clothes and look of the people in the book are hopelessly dated and unsophisticated, but the clear cut lessons will help any beginner understand the fundamentals of fashion drawing.Once someone has acquired these basic fashion drawing skills, there are several books on great fashion artists and designers to inspire them to take their drawing further to a more advanced level. For some unexplained reason,there are way too many books out today with fashion drawing instruction...and almost no fashion illustrations visible in print that are aimed at the general public beyond the industry journals. Unfortunately 90 percent of these books contain drawings that look like the work of mediocre (but very enthusiastic!) students which, unfortunately, only ends up misleading the beginner to make dreadful drawing mistakes. These books seem to just be cashing in on this fashion design frenzy that has gripped the world.

This book has easy to follow information on everything you want to know about drawing fashion.

This is a really great book for learning to draw fashion. It is organized into three sections: Drawing the Figure, Drawing the Garments and Rendering the Fabrics. It goes step-by-step though all the basics of drawing fashion. It covers everything such as heads, hands and feet, men, children, different silhouettes, and all sorts of fabrics and textures, really getting into the technique of drawing. The drawbacks are that the figures are kind of odd and the fashions drawn are from 1985, which seem ugly to us now, so it's not a source of artistic inspiration. However, I think it's the best fashion illustration book out there. It covers all the basics and then some.