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Custom Croquis

I’m pretty terrible at drawing. I took a pattern-drafting class in college, and the hardest part for me was drawing my own fashion figures (or croquis if you’re super fancy). It was always a struggle to get anything that resembled a human being, let alone had my own measurements.

These figures are obviously really useful for sketching new designs. I have searched for templates online and found a few decent ones, but my main problem with them is that they don’t look like most women.

Do you look like that? I know I don’t. But if you’re bad at drawing, what can you do?

I was contemplating this as I fell asleep last night and I had a sudden revelation: Photoshop! Why don’t I just get a picture of myself, draw over my shape in another layer, then turn off the picture. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

So I grabbed a recent photo of myself (this one’s from when I was a bridesmaid in a wedding):

Then I dropped the image opacity to about 30% and added a new layer on top and drew the lines:

Then you turn off the layer, and voila!

What I really like about this is that it matches my body shape perfectly. I have a super short torso, and it’ll be nice to design specifically for my weird body shape for once.

Categorized in: Musings